Katherine Fox

Ms. Katherine Fox serves as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Assistant Administrator for Mitigation within the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA). In this role, she oversees the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program (PDM), Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) grants and the National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP) Floodplain Management Program and Community Rating System (CRS). Ms. Fox also oversees FIMA’s Disaster Operations and leads the Hazard Mitigation Disaster Workforce Cadre.

Before joining FIMA, Ms. Fox was the Director of the FEMA National Preparedness Assessment Division, where she focused on a range of analytic efforts to evaluate the Nation’s preparedness posture, such as publishing the annual National Preparedness Report, evaluating state preparedness capabilities through the Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA) and Stakeholder Preparedness Reviews (SPR) and supporting the FEMA Continuous Improvement Program. Recently, Ms. Fox served as the Acting Assistant Administrator for the FEMA National Preparedness Directorate (NPD). In this capacity, she set NPD’s strategic priorities to build and validate National preparedness capabilities through national risk analysis, training more than two million first responders annually, conducting over 100 exercises and researching individual and community preparedness actions. Subsequently, she supported the FEMA Recovery Directorate with several critical needs during the response to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.

Ms. Fox has also served as Deputy Associate Administrator for Management and Performance Improvement in the FEMA Office of Policy and Program Analysis, in Branch Chief roles within the Individual Assistance Division, and as Senior Policy Advisor and Acting Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Recovery Directorate. Before she joined FEMA in 2008, Ms. Fox worked at the White House Office of Management and Budget as the FEMA Resource Analyst in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Ms. Fox holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BA degree in History from Oglethorpe University. She lives in Takoma Park, Md., with her husband and son.