Caltech is launching a Center for Disaster Resilience today, Wednesday, November 11, and it will be directed by the person Southern Californians have trusted most when the ground shakes: seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones. The center’s mission is to bring scientists deeper into policy decision-making across Southern California — to close the gap between what researchers know about disasters and what governments actually do about them.
That gap is the whole point. The fire is ten months behind us; the recovery will take years. A center built to fix the science-to-policy pipeline could not be launching in a more relevant place, or at a more relevant moment.
The three Rs — and the one we keep neglecting
Jones frames disasters in three phases: resilience, response, and recovery. Resilience is what you do before a disaster so you can come back faster. Response is what happens during it. Recovery is the long process of coming back — and in a time of climate change, she argues, it should mean coming back more resilient than before, not just rebuilding what was there.
The problem: the three phases are treated very differently by government. At the federal level, there is legislation for response — the Stafford Act, which governs FEMA’s role alongside state emergency managers. But resilience is, in her words, “very spottily covered. We have no overarching plan.” And recovery is not legislated at all. It is done ad hoc: about six months after a disaster, FEMA leaves and the Department of Housing and Urban Development takes over. “Doing only response is inadequate,” Jones says. “The resilience and the recovery have to be part of the disaster cycle and we need to acknowledge that.”
The center grows out of Jones’s own nonprofit, the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, which she founded about a decade ago after more than three decades as a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, including as scientist-in-charge of its Pasadena office. She is now a research associate at Caltech, and she lives near the burn area with her family; friends, neighbors, and colleagues were directly affected by the fire.
What recovery actually looks like
In a Caltech Science Exchange conversation recorded after the fires, Jones laid out what the next few years in Altadena and Pasadena should aim for — a standard the new center will presumably be measured against. Five years from now, she said, the goal is “a thriving community. We have people that have stayed. We have churches that have rebuilt. We have businesses that are operating again.” And alongside that, a community rebuilt to a better standard: more fire-resistant buildings, a water system able to handle the next event. “We need that thriving community, but we also need that fire resistant community.”
She is blunt about what gets in the way. Building codes are not retroactive, so older buildings stay built to older standards even after we learn to build better. And the single most important factor in whether a community recovers, researchers have found, is social capital: people connected to each other. That is why she urges residents to keep patronizing the small businesses on the edge of the disaster zone, and to keep holding concerts and events, “not just for the next three months. This needs to be for the next three years.”
What to watch
The announcement so far does not include funding figures or a first list of projects, so the test of this center will be what it actually does in its first year: which agencies it works with, which policies it tries to change, and whether any of it reaches Pasadena and Altadena while the recovery is still under way. The promise is clear enough. As Jones puts it in her book The Big Ones: “Natural hazards are inevitable; human catastrophes are not.” The center’s job is to make that sentence true in policy, not just in print.
Sources: Los Angeles Daily News, “Caltech, Dr. Lucy Jones launching disaster resilience center to bring science and policy together” (November 6, 2026); Caltech Science Exchange, “After the Fires,” Episode 2: “Resiliency and Rebuilding” (Lucy Jones interview/transcript); Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society. Photo: Dr. Lucy Jones — FEMA / Adam Dubrowa (public domain).
