Lauren Clay is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of the Department of Emergency Health Services at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on individual, household, and community recovery from disasters. She has studied Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Florence, and Laura, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, the 2013 Moore, OK tornadoes, and the Camp Fire among other disasters and public health emergencies. Her expertise is in disaster disruption to the local food environment and food insecurity. Currently, she has several studies underway examining long-term recovery and public health impacts from Hurricane Katrina, food insecurity following Hurricane Florence and the Camp Fire, and several studies looking at food access and security during the COVID-19 pandemic. She co-chairs the national Healthy Eating Research (a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)/Nutrition and Obesity Prevention Research and Evaluation Network (funded by CDC) COVID-19 Food and Nutrition Security Working Group and is a Data Ambassador for the NSF-funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure DesignSafe-Cyber Infrastructure cloud computing space for big data. From 2018-2020 she was an Early Career Research Fellow with the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Gulf Research Program. She has a PhD in Disaster Science and Management from University of Delaware and a Master of Public Health from Drexel University.