Beth Brown
Manager, Corporate Command Center
Target Corporation

Title: Target Corporation’s Worldwide Corporate Command Center
Synopsis: The capabilities of Target’s Global Crisis Management team – including Business Continuity, Global Intelligence and the Corporate Command Center – will be discussed along with a detailed look at Hurricane Irene, the tools used and lessons learned.

Steven A. McCleskey
Vice President – Business Continuity and Incident Response
Regions Financial

Title: Incident Response: Practical Experience Shared
Synopsis: A general guide for designing and developing an effective incident response program.

Leonard Mazzocco
Group Director HR Systems
Belarmino Castellanos
Director – Issue & Crisis Management (QA Hotline/Customer Resolution)
Whataburger Restaurants LLC

Title: Prioritizing Logistics – Leveraging the Resources of the Business to Meet the Needs of your Community
Synopsis: Leveraging resources to meet your business needs while honoring your community’s expectations involves balance. Knowing your customer well, while empathizing with your Team (and recognizing limits), helps create an atmosphere of trust during a crisis.

Mike Mastrangelo
Program Director, Institutional Preparedness
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

Title: Betting the Company Decisions
Synopsis: What lessons can public, private, non-profit and for-profit entities learn from UTMB’s Post-Ike experience to improve the resilience of their own organization?

Chris Hebert
Lead Hurricane Meteorologist
ImpactWeather, Inc.

Title: Recent Advances in Storm-Generated Surge Science
Synopsis: Learn how storm surge is generated, how it is forecast and why the Saffir-Simpson scale should not be used to estimate a hurricane's storm surge potential.

Dr. John L. Schroeder
Director, Wind Science and Engineering Research Center
Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science
Texas Tech University

Title: A General Overview of the Mission of the Texas Tech Hurricane Research Team
Synopsis: A summary of the research efforts of the Texas Tech University Hurricane Research Team will be presented, including deployment efforts in Hurricane Irene.

Dr. Phil Klotzbach Research Scientist, Department of Atmospheric Science
Colorado State University

Title: The 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook
Synopsis: The methodology behind CSU's seasonal hurricane forecasts will be explained and the outlook for the 2012 Atlantic basin hurricane season will be discussed.

Brian Hill
Director of Public Affairs
The Houston Zoo

Title: The Houston Zoo: Locking Down for Landfall
Synopsis: An inside look at how the best zoo in the country prepares not only to ride it out but also to recover from it afterwards.