Lindsay Brown

I've been working in emergency management for about 5 years, and I'm currently an Emergency Preparedness and Response Specialist, a role I've held for nearly 2 years as of March. Before this position, I worked at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment as the Department Operations Center Coordinator at the state level, doing similar work in emergency preparedness. I also serve as a reservist with FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for their Disaster Survivor Assistance Cadre, which means I get deployed to disasters when needed. My main area of expertise is public health emergency preparedness and response, and I specialize in trainings and exercises. In my current role, I run our emergency preparedness and response training and exercise program, which involves making trainings available for our staff and conducting exercises to help prepare them to respond to emergencies. My day-to-day work includes writing and updating plans on anything public health emergency related, such as our recovery plan. When there is an emergency, I serve as the planning section chief within our incident command structure, where I'm essentially organizing everything - setting up briefings that happen usually on a daily basis, taking notes, writing situation reports, developing our incident action plan, and coordinating with our operations section. I think of it as being the one that's organizing everything and acting like the secretary, attending a lot of meetings and writing reports. I'm currently working on my Master's Exercise Practitioner Program certification, which I'm halfway through and consider a pretty big accomplishment. I'm also on the board of a non-profit that's just starting up called Women of Emergency Management, which is important to me because I want to stand out in my discipline and have other women feel comfortable joining my field, since it is mainly very heavily male-dominated.