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Assistant Professor
Cook Office Building, Room 209
848-932-9153
kk1577@sebs.rutgers.edu
Research interests: crisis governance, disaster politics, resilience, public health policy, risk governance, public health emergencies, emergency management, compound disasters and polycrisis, sustainability governance, federalism, state and local politics and policy
Dr. Klasa’s google scholar and linkedin page.
Biography
Kasia (Katarzyna) Klasa is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Dr. Klasa earned her Ph.D. in Health Services Organization and Policy, as well as her MPH, from the University of Michigan. She received both her BSN from the Nursing School and her BS from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
She is both a health policy researcher and a political scientist who studies the politics of disasters and public health emergencies, and crisis governance. Her research broadly falls into three areas: (a) the intersection of public health and emergency management, (b) resilience and risk governance, and (c) public health policy and politics. Her work focuses on understanding how political institutions shape and impact public health and sustainable systems, as well as how governance and institutions can be made resilient in the face of systemic shocks, crises, and uncertainty. She is specifically interested in using mixed methods to study the consequences of federalism and subnational (state and local) politics on disaster and public health emergency response, recovery, and preparedness to develop effective policies and resilient communities.
Dr. Klasa has worked with the Risk and Decision Science Team within the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (Environmental Lab) as well as an ORISE Fellow in the Center for Engineering for Public Health and Human Factors. She has also collaborated with the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and the World Health Organization. Prior to academia, she worked as a registered nurse in surgical nursing and public health nursing.