James K. Mitchell

James K. Mitchell is a Professor of Geography at Rutgers University. He was born in Northern Ireland and came to the United States for graduate study in 1965. After gaining his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Chicago he joined the Rutgers faculty in 1970. He specialized in the field of hazards research and has authored more than 100 professional publications. He has served on several disaster-related committees of the National Research Council and chaired the Council's ad hoc committee on the International Decade for Natural Hazard Reduction. More recently he founded the international journals Global Environmental Change, and Environmental Hazards: Human and Policy Dimensions and was appointed as Chair of the International Geographical Union's Study Group on the Disaster Vulnerability of Megacities.