Jaimie Hicks Masterson

Jaimie Hicks Masterson, AICP, is director of Texas Target Communities at Texas A&M University, high impact service-learning and community engagement program. For more than a decade, she's worked alongside low-capacity communities to address pressing challenges related to land use planning and hazards. She's worked with over 60 community partners across Texas to execute participatory planning processes to develop community plans to tackle threats to their economy, environment, and culture. Based on this work, in 2019, the Liberty County Strategic Plan received the national Silver Planning Achievement Award from the American Planning Association. Masterson has written over 20 peer-reviewed publications and 2 books, most notably Planning for Community Resilience: A Handbook to Reducing Vulnerabilities to Disasters, which focuses on hazard mitigation strategies and tools for government officials, planners, and emergency managers that can be incorporated pre-disaster. From 2019-2023, she led the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard project funded by the Department of Homeland Security and a part of the Center for Coastal Resilience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Masterson also consults with small communities to develop comprehensive plans, economic development plans, and other planning needs to fold and infuse resilience practices into community initiatives.