Dr. Pinel serves as senior planner for the Resilience Services Branch within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), working with partners and communities to enhance resilience of critical infrastructure during planning, design, and recovery operations. She co-developed the port resilience assessment guide project with the United States Army Corps of Engineers and leads implementation of the Infrastructure Resilience Planning Framework with local and regional partners. During 2017 hurricane season, Pinel deployed to Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands to support DHS’s role in the National Disaster Recovery Framework.
Pinel holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the University of Wisconsin Madison with minors in anthropology and Latin American studies. She joined DHS after serving as faculty at the University of Idaho, University of Nebraska, and universities in Ecuador and the Philippines and is affiliated with Antioch University NE. Her professional planning experience with Native American tribal, local, state, non-governmental agencies focused on capacity-building and inter-governmental coordination of infrastructure programs. As former co-lead for several social and ecological resilience initiatives funded by the National Science Foundation and other agencies, she mentored Ecuadorian faculty and served as Fulbright NEXUS of the Americas Scholar. Her international research and publications have focused on the role of multi-jurisdictional governance and inter-agency conflict management in resilience outcomes.