Fran H. Norris, PhD is the Director and Principal Investigator of the National Center for Disaster Mental Health Research. She received a PhD in Community/Social Psychology from the University of Louisville. She is a Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School, a Research Associate of the Executive Division of the Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD, and an executive committee member of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (NC-START) at the University of Maryland.
Her interests include the epidemiology of posttraumatic stress, cross-cultural studies, the mobilization and deterioration of social support after disasters, community resilience, and systems issues in providing disaster mental health services.
Her disaster studies have focused on such events as floods in Appalachia, Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew in the United States, and Hurricane Paulina and the 1999 floods and mudslides in Mexico. Since 2005, she has been serving as National Cross-Site Evaluator for the Crisis Counseling Assistance and Training Program, funded by FEMA and administered by SAMHSA.
She is the Deputy/Statistical Editor of the Journal of Traumatic Stress and the Scientific Editor of the PTSD Research Quarterly. She is chairing a task force on disaster recovery for the Society for Community Research and Action (Division 27 of the American Psychological Association).