Jordan R. Fischbach, Ph.D., is the Vice President for Applied Research and Director of Planning and Policy Research at The Water Institute. He helps to oversee the Institute’s applied research portfolio, manages a research department, and leads policy research projects focused on climate adaptation, urban resilience, coastal planning, flood risk analysis, and post-disaster recovery. His expertise includes Robust Decision Making and other methods for decision making under deep uncertainty (DMDU), risk analysis, and interactive data visualization.

Before joining the Institute, Jordan was codirector of the RAND Climate Resilience Center, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, and an affiliate faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Since 2010, he has been a principal investigator for the Coastal Louisiana Risk Assessment (CLARA) modeling effort, which provides next-level modeling capabilities for Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to estimate flood risk under a wide range of future environmental, operational, and growth uncertainties and with various proposed projects in place.

Jordan has also led recent Institute work evaluating the economic, environmental, and social benefits of Nature Based Solutions and investigating present and future flood risk from heavy rainfall in New Orleans. His other work includes serving as a co-investigator for the NOAA MARISA Climate Adaptation Partnership program, which has the goal to support the effective utilization of climate science and the building of adaptive capacity and resilience to climate variability and change in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Dr. Fischbach earned a B.A. with Honors in History from Columbia University in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School in 2010, where he was awarded the Herbert Goldhamer Memorial Award.