Bio
Bill
Donner is a second-year Ph.D student in the Department of Sociology and
Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. He entered the graduate
program after receiving a B.A. in Sociology at Millersville University
of Pennsylvania (Millersville, PA) and joined the DRC at the beginning
of September, 2002. His areas of concentration include social theory,
collective behavior, social movements, and disasters. In addition, he
has interest in social research methods and Geographic Information
Systems (GIS).
Bill recently completed his Master’s Thesis—entitled “The Human
Ecological Model and Its Application to Severe Weather Phenomena:
Predicting Tornado Morbidity”—examining the relationship between
tornado morbidity, tornado watches and warnings, and human ecological
trends. His future dissertation research will explore the ways in which
social and economic factors impact and shape the response to and
management of severe weather events.
Bill is currently lead graduate student on DRC’s end-user integration
project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). This
research ultimately intends to integrate the feedback and information
obtained from end-users—particularly emergency managers—into the design
of radar technology under current development by the Engineering
Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere
(CASA), a multidisciplinary Engineering Research Center (ERC) composed
of meteorologists, engineers, computer scientists, and social
scientists.
