Frances Edwards, Ph.D.
San Jose State University/City of San Jose

Frances L. Edwards, Ph.D., CEM is the Director of Emergency Preparedness for the City of San Jose, and is responsible for the development of citywide emergency plans, and the City's Emergency Operations Center. She was named one of the Silicon Valley Power 100 by San Jose Magazine, and was Public Official of the Year 2002 in Governing Magazine.

Dr. Edwards is Director of the San Jose Metropolitan Medical Task Force (MMTF), the terrorism response unit that has been featured in national publications including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. She has a chapter in First to Respond, published by MIT Press in 2003, and is co-author with Brian Jenkins of Saving City Lifelines, published by Mineta Institute in 2002, and NATO and Terrorism: Catastrophic Terrorism and First Responders, with Friedrich Steinhausler, published by Springer Publishers in 2005. Dr. Edwards has written two chapters and co-authored a third in the Handbook of Crisis and Disaster Management, a chapter in The Hoover Institution's The New Terror: Facing the Threat of Biological and Chemical Weapons, and chapters in five emergency management textbooks. She represented emergency management on ABC's Nightline with Ted Kopple five night "Bio War" series in October, 1999. She has written more than 25 professional journal articles, including "When Government Works: Collaborating to Save Lives" in the May 2002 edition of Leader to Leader Magazine. She is vice chair of the Collaborative for Disaster Mitigation at San Jose State University, a member of the the Bioterrorism Working Group at Stanford, and has served on the MMRS Evaluating Committee of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, and Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness at Harvard. She is an associate professor in SJSU's public administration program, and a research associate at the Mineta Transportation Institute.

Dr. Edwards has a Ph.D. in public administration, and a master of urban planning degree from New York University; a MA degree in political science/international relations from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey; and a Certificate in Hazardous Materials Management from University of California, Irvine. She is an instructor for DHS and FEMA courses, including AWR-160, "Incident Response to Terrorist Bombing," "Responding to Suicide Bombing," and CERT.