Glenn Corbett is an Associate Professor of Fire Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where he is also the chair of the Department of Protection Management. He is a Technical Editor of Fire Engineering magazine and is a former Assistant Chief of the Waldwick, New Jersey Fire Department. He testified before the 9/11 Commission and recently served on the Federal Advisory Committee of the National Construction Safety Team that investigated the World Trade Center disaster. In addition, he is the chief technical advisor to the Skyscraper Safety Campaign. Corbett has served as the President of the New Jersey Society of Fire Service Instructors.
Corbett is a co-author of Brannigan’s Building Construction for the Fire Service, 4th Edition. In addition, he is the editor of Fire Engineering’s Handbook for Firefighter I and II. He also has an avid interest in firefighting and history, authoring The Great Paterson Fire of 1902 and co-authoring Historic Fires of New York City. Corbett holds a Master of Engineering in Fire Protection Engineering degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Public Administration from Rutgers University. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Texas.
Aldon E. Cotton: Born in 1968,Rev. Cotton is the youngest of six boys raised in Back of Town by church-going parents who worked around the clock to provide for their family. As a child Aldon showed talent for music, determination, spirituality, reasoning ability, and sociability were already clearly visible in Aldon before the first of many “nobody-but-Jesus” moments at the age of fourteen when a train accident changed his way of doing some things. At the age of twenty-two, he began pastoring at the only church he has ever known, Jerusalem Baptist Church (Jerusalem) in Central City. Although in ways he is an example of upward mobility, rising from his grandparents’ plantation shack in Vacherie to a middle class home on Lake Carmel with his wife and three children, he refuses to prioritize material values. After doing everything possible to prepare his congregation of 160 members for the evacuation from the city, including Mapquest instructions and emergency phone numbers, he caravanned along with thirty church and family members to Greenville, Mississippi, on August 28, 2005. Determined from day one of Katrina to return home, Cotton began working with coalitions of pastors and churches to facilitate the rebuilding process. In the late spring of 2010, a foundation was laid for the new Jerusalem.
Mitchell Crusto: Professor Crusto has recently published three important leading constitutional law articles. Enslaved Constitution analyzes the constitutional right to intra-state travel and is published in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review. Unconscious Classism argues for the equal treatment of business entities under constitutional principles and is published in the University of Pennsylvania’s Journal of Constitutional Law. Obama’s Moral Capitalism proposes a constitutional right against economic exploitation and is published in the University of Miami Law Review.
At Loyola, Crusto currently teaches first year Common Law Property and The Legal Profession courses as well as upper level business courses. He is a member of the Louisiana, Missouri, Illinois Bar Associations and the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple (London, England). He clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and has served two U.S. Presidents in senior governmental policy positions.
Keith C. Ferdinand: Keith C. Ferdinand, MD, FACC, FAHA, received his medical degree from Howard University College of Medicine. Before Hurricane Katrina, he was the co-founder and medical director of Heartbeats Life Center in the 9th Ward, where he was raised. He is board certified in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease, a diplomat certified in the subspecialty of nuclear cardiology, an American Society of Hypertension certified specialist in clinical hypertension. In addition, he is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, and the National Lipid Association. He is co-author of Overcoming Katrina African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond, with Dr. D’Ann Penner (Palgrave McMillan 2009), a collection of 27 oral histories and co-editor of Cardiovascular Disease in Racial &Ethnic Minorities (Humana Press 2009). Currently, Ferdinand lives in Atlanta, Georgia, serves as the Chief Science Officer of the Association of Black Cardiologists, and is a Clinical Professor, Cardiology Division, at Emory University.
Salomon A. Guajardo: Dr. Guajardo is Professor of Public Management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York. Prior to joining the Department of Public Management in 2009, Dr. Guajardo was a management consultant with Accenture. He also served in various senior management positions at Miami-Dade Public Schools, Nassau County (New York), and Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA). His research has appeared in Government Finance Review, Journal of Socio-economic Planning Sciences, Public Administration Review, Public Personnel Management, Review of Public Personnel Administration, and Security Journal. He received his Ph.D. in public policy analysis and research from the University of Pittsburgh.
Parnell Herbert: Raised in the Lafitte Project, Parnell started washing dishes in the French Quarter in 1962 to help supplement his single mother’s wages. He dropped out of school, which he found boring, and took to the streets. He joined the Navy during the Vietnam War, and while on leave from the Navy in San Francisco he was introduced to the Black Panthers, a Party founded in 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Herbert never joined the organization, but he sympathized with its values from that time on. Upon his discharge from the Navy, he got married, had children, landed a technician’s job with BellSouth, and bought a house in Gentilly. Known as the “Poetic Panther,” in retirement he began to publish poetry and give workshops on racism around the country. Although his primary residence is now in Houston, Herbert is actively involved in efforts to rebuild New Orleans along racially just lines. His most recent play, Angola 3, is critically acclaimed.
Victor Herbert: After a long career in K-12 education including a variety of positions culminating with three school superintendencies, Victor offered to serve as a consultant to the Fire Department of New York City (FDNY). Soon after 9/11 he joined the department on a full time basis as Dean of Instruction. His combined experiences in education and emergency management enabled him to obtain a distinguished lecturer position at John Jay College in the Protection Management Department. He authored Moving Forward When Others Move Back: Managing Critical Incidents. He has been the executive director for ACIA for the last year and a half.
Jed Horne: During 40 years in journalism, Jed Horne has worked at top-level newspapers and magazines in Boston, New York and New Orleans. He is the author of two well-regarded books and has reported from Latin America and Africa as well as Europe and Japan. Newsroom experiences have run the gamut from writing to editing to hiring and management of a staff of 30 editors and reporters. He has lectured extensively and done numerous radio and television interviews. His bylined work was included in submissions for which The Times-Picayune was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in 2006. He retired from the paper in 2007. Currently he is editor of The Lens, a non-profit New Orleans news site, serves as distinguished visiting lecturer at the University of Southern Mississippi and is a consultant to local and national foundations in the areas of health care and education reform.
Pamela Jenkins, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology and faculty in the Women’s Studies Program at the University of New Orleans. She is a founding and associate member of UNO’s Center for Hazard Assessment, Response and Technology. Before Katrina, her research interests were diverse but included how to evaluate collaboratives in local non-profits, how domestic violence programs operate to provide greater safety for women, and how coastal communities understand risk and preparedness. Her research interests post Katrina include documenting the response to Katrina as part of a national research team on Hurricane Katrina evacuees. She has published on first responders, faith-based communities’ response to the storm, and the experiences of elderly during and after Katrina. At a community level, she is involved in several projects that deal directly with best practice for evacuation, one with congregations and other faith based organizations and the other with the elderly and vulnerable community members.
Denise Roubion-Johnson: In 1972, Denise was a debutante and the homecoming queen of Joseph S. Clark High School. She rose from meager economic circumstances to direct a cancer-screening program in the outpatient clinic of the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans (Charity Hospital). A wife, mother of four, and a grandmother. Denise led a busy life before the storm of family, work, and education. Denise, her husband, Ronald Johnson Sr., who suffers from sickle-cell anemia, and her sixteen-year-old son, Ronald Johnson Jr., rode out the storm at University Hospital, where she spent the remainder of the week giving emergency care to newborn infants, mothers, and ICU patients. By October 2005, she had resettled her family in Houston, reconnected with her missing cancer patients, and returned to New Orleans, where she worked to help the large number of women who lost their health insurance after Katrina. Recently, she opened a new clinic in New Orleans and in August, 2010, she will receive a doctorate degree.
Frank Ochberg, M.D.: Frank Ochberg, M.D. is a founding board member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and recipient of their highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award. He edited the first text on treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, and served on the committee that defined PTSD.
He was associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health and director of the Michigan Mental Health Department. At Michigan State University, he is clinical professor of psychiatry, formerly adjunct professor of criminal justice, and adjunct professor of journalism. Ochberg developed, with colleagues, the Academy for Critical Incident Analysis at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Gift From Within (a charity for persons with PTSD), and the Committee for Community Awareness and Protection (responding to serial-killer threats). For the latter activity, he is the first physician to receive the Law Enforcement Medal of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Ochberg founded the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, served as its first chairman and now helps journalists understand traumatic stress and traumatic stress experts understand journalists. He participated in the Dart Society’s Project Katrina, gutting houses and building trust. As a Red Cross volunteer, Ochberg assisted families at sites of earthquakes, floods, fires and aircraft disasters. He represents the Dart Foundation and directs their support of victimization programs around the world.
D’Ann R. Penner, PhD,: Professor Penner is a Scholar in Residence at the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University and an oral historian of human rights’ debacles. On August 29, 2005, Dr. Penner was a tenured professor of Russian history and the director of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at The University of Memphis. Between September 2005 and August 2008, she conducted over 275 interviews of African American survivors displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Along with Dr. Keith C. Ferdinand, Penner is the co-author of Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2009). Intended as a corrective to media portrayals of Black New Orleanians as poor and unruly, it reflects the priorities of its 27 diverse narrators and honors their wishes to have their words interjected into the public sphere. Penner holds a PhD in history from the University of California at Berkeley and is a rising 2L at Loyola University New Orleans School of Law.
Sandy Rosenthal: After Hurricane Katrina, Sandy Rosenthal, then 49 founded Levees.Org, a flood protection non-profit with a mission of education – that metro New Orleans was destroyed primarily by civil engineering failure not a weather event. Levees.org is a “genuine” grassroots group and accepts no funding from stakeholder industries. Levees.org has grown to nearly 25,000 supporters with satellite locations in Florida, California, New York, Illinois and Oregon. In late 2007 she gave up her job as advertising executive to devote full time to the demands of being an activist leader. Rosenthal graduated from Mount Holyoke College cum laude in 1979 and received an MBA from Tulane University New Orleans in 1981. Ms. Rosenthal is a New Orleans resident since 1980, has been married for 29 years, and has three adult children and two dachshunds.
Harold Toussaint: Born in 1950 in the uptown community of Pigeontown, Harold chose his family name in adulthood to disassociate himself from a reminder of slavery. Although he feels most at home in France, he is quick to say that he has never forgotten his time in the Upper Ninth Ward, where his family moved when he was six. A self-taught, free-spirited sommelier who has won contests in Paris, San Francisco, and Boston, Toussaint took a sabbatical from his craft when he returned to New Orleans in 2000 and became involved in his church. Deacon Harold, as he is known, takes pride in his pre-Katrina role as a caregiver to the oldest generation and a mentor to the young people of his church and community. During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he rescued over 40 people. Since the storm, he has lived in Atlanta, New Orleans, New York, and Boston. Presently, he is working at a restaurant in Greenwich Village.
