Advertise on podcast: Let's Talk Risk

In this episode of Let's Talk Risk, we're diving into a conversation with two leaders in global development: Abhilash Panda from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction—the team responsible for delivering the Sendai Framework worldwide—and Jordan Schwartz, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest source of multilateral financing for Latin America and the Caribbean.  We discuss why our institutions aren't built to handle systemic risk, why the term "resilience" means completely different things to different people within the same organization, and what would need to change if we actually wanted to protect the systems we depend on. Listen now!

Khara Grieger, assistant professor of environmental health and risk assessment at NC State University, joins Dr. Sandra Alday to discuss emerging nanotechnologies and their unique applications. Grieger discusses avenues to managing the risks of nanotech development in biotechnology and genetic engineering, as well as the rise of artificial intelligence.

How do we keep elections secure in a world of evolving technology and human error? In this episode, Dr. Sandra Alday sits down with Dr. Natalie Scala, professor and researcher at Towson University, to explore the complex interplay between people and machines in American voting systems. From the shift to vote-by-mail and the risks posed by flash drives, to the critical role of poll workers and the potential future of digital voting, Natalie shares insights from her research on election integrity. Listen now! This research will be presented December 7-10, 2025 at the annual SRA Conference in Washington D.C.

Dr. Dominic Balog-Way and Dr. Katherine McComas of Cornell University join Sandra Alday for a compelling episode on their paper titled "Unpacking the Risk of Misinformation: A Communication-Based Critique" published in Risk Analysis. The risk researchers, who first connected at the 2011 SRA Conference and are now close coworkers, have examined the ways people try to place agency and intent on messaging in order to make sense of communication.  You can watch the webinar they hosted on this topic at sra.org/events-webinars, or consider registering for SRA 2025. You might meet your future collaborator!

In this latest episode, Dr. Sandra Alday is joined by two guests from the University of Melbourne: Dr. Anna Kosovac and Dr. Olivia Meehan. Together, they've created a course that addresses the subjectivity of risk and how people make decisions based on their comfort level with uncertainty. Incorporating the humanities into the risk classroom helps us move away from the limitations of rationality. 

Dr. Sandra Alday is joined by Manomita Das of the Joint Centre for Disaster Research at Massey University. Together, they discuss what motivates people's behaviors before and after a disaster strikes. How do small acts of kindness impact the disaster landscape? Who is responsible for taking care of risks? And are we better off taking action as individuals or as communities? Learn more in this latest episode. 

Dr. Sandra Alday is joined by professor of risk analysis and decision science, Robyn Wilson, to discuss how we perceive risks and make decisions.  

In the early hours of July 4, 2025, a torrent of 100 billion gallons of rain fell on Kerr County, Texas causing the Guadalupe River to rise meters in minutes. This tragedy was followed by intense flooding throughout the Midwest and northeast. In this episode, host of Let's Talk Risk, Dr. Sandra Alday, is joined by Dr. David Johnson of Purdue University to talk risk and rainfall as they try to understand recent flooding that has devasted parts of the country. 

On this episode of Let's Talk Risk, Robyn Wilson, Professor of Risk Analysis and Decision Science and Acting Associate Director of Research and Graduate Education, joins us to talk about the risks of developing a flexible and sensitive measure of risk perception. 

On this episode of Let's Talk Risk, Cameron MacKenzie, Associate Professor at the IMSE Department at Iowa State University, joins us to talk about the risks of mass shootings in schools, malls, churches, and other public venues. 

On this episode of Let's Talk Risk, Professor Jun Zhuang, the Morton C. Frank Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Buffalo, joins to talk misinformation on social media. Zhuang breaks down what misinformation on social media is and why it's important for us to think about.

Benjamin K. Sovacool, professor at Boston University, University of Sussex, and Aarhus University, joins the podcast to discuss his new research on climate geoengineering. Sovacool dives into the risk tradeoffs of carbon removal and solar radiation management. His research highlights different risks in the climate system, and the institutional, political, behavioral, social and cultural risks that accompany deployment of new technology. To close out the podcast, Sovacool shares the three policy implications from the study. 

Dr. David Johnson, professor of industrial engineering with a joint appointment of political science at Purdue University, joins Let's Talk Risk to discuss his most recent work on the inequities and health impacts of flooding. States and communities struggle when thinking about how to better incorporate equity consideration into their planning process. To combat this, Johnson explains a new metric to evaluate projects that normalize the value of homes: treating all households the same. Instead of trying to prioritize projects based on protecting value, Johnson and his fellow researchers created an alternative metric that thinks about protecting households, irrespective of their value.

There are plenty of environmental issues plaguing the world today. Whether it's climate change, water shortage or waste, it always boils down to one thing: consumption patterns. Prerna Shah, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Buffalo, joins the podcast to share her and Dr. Janet Yang's research where they analyze whether communication can help dispel inaccurate beliefs on sustainable products and if it can drive people toward more positive behavior. 

Nicole Jackson, Ph.D., of Sandia National Labs, joins the Let's Talk Risk podcast to talk about her work analyzing how extreme weather events and climate hazards impact physical infrastructures. Jackson shares her experiences on researching how long outages are and how many people were affected to get a sense of the duration of the event and the kind of magnitude of the event from a human perspective. This conversation covers how communities are equipped for extreme weather events, energy equity, resiliency of different countries, socio-economic factors, and more.