Associate Professor DeeDee Bennett Gayle of the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security and her team are developing technologies powered by artificial intelligence and virtual reality (VR) designed to help vulnerable populations prepare for extreme events. In this episode, DeeDee discusses one of their latest projects that uses VR headsets to teach older adults how to respond to large-scale emergencies.
Beyond her research on emergency management and technology, DeeDee also works on enhancing climate resiliency in coastal regions.
In 2023, DeeDee was selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to serve as Ocean Decade Champion, which led her to attend the 2024 IOC/UNESCO Ocean Decade Conference in Barcelona. The summit spotlighted research that integrates natural, social and technological disciplines toward a shared mission of building coastal resilience.
We asked DeeDee about takeaways from this experience.
The experience was invaluable. I've noticed a growing divide between STEM and social sciences when tackling complex problems. While we often call for data-driven, STEM-focused solutions, many questions, like why people behave as they do or how to drive change, require qualitative, social science perspectives.
Solving complex problems, like climate change, poverty, or expanding STEM education, requires more than one discipline. Funding mechanisms should reflect this and support truly inclusive, community-engaged research.
In addition to being a respected scholar in disaster preparedness, DeeDee is one of many UAlbany faculty members focused on ensuring that what she learns in her lab is translated to the real world, where that knowledge can help people.
DeeDee’s research on individual and household emergency preparedness shows that organizations struggle to teach the public how to deal with disasters in part because there are not enough opportunities to practice in immersive ways. To address this, her startup company Almanta developed a game called “All Hazards.” Played using a VR headset, the game allows the user to roleplay their way through a disaster scenario. The result, she says, is not just building tech for agencies, but building more prepared and resilient communities, one household at a time.
Almanta won runner up in the UAlbany Innovation Center’s Research and Innovators Startup Exchange (RISE) pitch competition in Fall 2025, winning $15,000 in seed funding.
Discover the work DeeDee is undertaking with her team at the Extreme Events, Social Equity, and Technology Lab.
Learn more about DeeDee’s experience testifying before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging about emergency preparedness and response.
Watch a video that captured DeeDee’s team as they tested their wearable VR tech with test users in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Interview, research and writing by Mike Nolan
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photo by Brian Busher
Hosted and writing by Erin Frick
Erin Frick: Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions, and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Erin Frick in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
Not long ago, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset looked more like an accessory plucked off a prop table on the set of Star Trek than something you'd have in your home. Now that VR headsets have moved into the mainstream, their uses for everyday consumers are expanding from video games and entertainment to training tools that could save lives.
Take, for example, the work of Associate Professor DeeDee Bennett Gayle. DeeDee directs UAlbany's Extreme Events, Social Equity, and Technology Lab — which is developing tools designed to support vulnerable populations in the face of disaster.
We might think we know what to do in an emergency, but in reality, there's only so much we can do to practice reacting to a severe, large-scale event like a natural disaster or a chemical spill. This is where DeeDee's team — with the help of virtual reality and artificial intelligence — is breaking new ground.
Imagine putting on a headset and being guided through what to do during a hurricane, flood or earthquake evacuation — without leaving your home.
This project is among DeeDee’s efforts to make emergency preparedness trainings more realistic — and accessible to everyone — with a special focus on tailoring technologies to older adults, as well as other groups who might be disproportionately affected by extreme events.
To test their tech in the hands of target users, DeeDee’s team assembled focus groups of older adults who donned the VR headsets and were immediately immersed in a simulated disaster scenario displayed on the headset’s internal screen.
In this virtual world, participants were taught what to do to prepare for the disaster at hand. They also had the opportunity to practice responding and making decisions.
In this episode, my colleague Mike Nolan caught up with DeeDee to discuss why we need to take a closer look at ways to better involve older adults in emergency planning and response.
She also explains how an early interest in tinkering led her to pursue degrees in electrical engineering and public policy, which together with firsthand experiences with disasters across the U.S., have uniquely shaped her approach to the risks we all live with — but probably don't think about enough.
Here’s Mike and DeeDee.
Mike Nolan: Was there anything in your childhood that sparked you to get into academic research, or more specifically, disaster management?
DeeDee Bennett Gayle: I was a child that was taking everything apart. I took apart the TV, I took apart the phone, and then I just have to make it work again, and so that was something that I constantly did. I had one of the earliest computers and I worked on those. I've always been that person that likes to tinker with technology and loves gadgets. So, the idea of me becoming an engineer was probably a straightforward path from my childhood.
I've been in several disasters. I've seen the tornadoes in Oklahoma and had to get to a shelter. I've been through an earthquake, been through hurricane force winds, and notice that I've been moving across the country and there's a lot of different types of emergencies. And yeah, each time I move, it's like having to learn: What's that sound? What is the siren here for? What am I supposed to do here? Where are the shelters? So that kind of thing also fed into trying to figure out, how's anybody supposed to know this? Do people actually look this up before they move anywhere? No, they just move and then they learn it on the way.
Mike Nolan: You have a degree in electrical engineering and in public policy. So why don't you walk a little bit through your academic journey and how it led to a research career in emergency management and disaster science?
DeeDee Bennett Gayle: Yeah, so I got my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, and once I graduated, I had a research center job in which I was working for a bunch of professors and they were doing radio frequency design of wireless systems, and then I started noticing gaps in what they were doing, and I decided to offer up, “Hey, I could be a lab manager.” So created a position for myself. I ended up helping them with calibration of the equipment, keeping up with maintenance of the equipment, and then also somehow became the person that was going overseas to talk about the research that was being done there and translate it for application to a layman audience.
I went to Amsterdam, Netherlands, Germany, and this was post 9/11, and one of the things that they were working on was on the public safety spectrum band and looking at how they could potentially share the bandwidth in case of a disaster, and they did prove the concept, but it made me think there are some policy implications here. There are some issues that I don't think the engineers are connecting with what's going to happen in reality in terms of implementation of it. And then I went and decided to get my master's in looking at the public safety spectrum band for emergency management and specifically how it was going to affect the broader population and people with disabilities.
Mike Nolan: It's a really interesting journey to where you are now, and also makes sense – as to what led to your latest project, which is exploring emerging tech and virtual reality as a tool to prepare folks with vulnerabilities, older adults, for disasters.
DeeDee Bennett Gayle: Yeah.
Mike Nolan: Let's talk a little bit about that project. What motivated you to pursue it and just some background on what the project is.
DeeDee Bennett Gayle: It kind of came from so many meetings with FEMA Higher Ed Institute about preparedness. There was a report that they put out, and it's about the culture of preparedness and how the culture of preparedness in the United States is kind of low, and I think it's connected to the idea of what disasters are and who is responsible for preparing for disasters. When do we prepare, when are we super preppers, when are we just completely oblivious to what we can do? And when you look at disasters that have happened in the past, you'll see the same trends over and over again. There's a good portion of the subset of populations that are constantly left in the wind after disasters, and it does have to come down to preparedness.
Historically in the research, it's always been thought of as a financial problem. So, I know a lot of economists have looked at this and they're thinking about, well, if we just figure out the finances, then people could prepare. But I do think it's also a mentality. It's an idea of: “Is this hurricane really going to hit right now or is it going to just blow on pass? If I leave and my place is destroyed, when I come back, am I going to be able to rebuild, be able to keep this land that's been in my family for so many years?” And that becomes a big issue. And how do you change mindsets on anything? And maybe some people’s mindsets are changed after they go through a disaster, but maybe it's also training and education about it and virtual reality so far is a very good medium to kind of test a lot of the things we want to test, but how do you test them in that moment? So that's where the idea came from to do virtual reality.
Mike Nolan: What kinds of disasters or what types of scenarios are you simulating and what do the results look like so far?
DeeDee Bennett Gayle: So right now, we have a hurricane and a chemical spill that we're testing out. We picked those two specifically because they were so different in terms of the types of disasters that you'd see. We also didn't want it to become something in which people just thought we were looking at weather related disasters or disasters from natural hazards. We wanted to cover the idea that this could be useful across all of the different hazards that we see here in the United States. We've been experimenting with older adults now, but we've also showcased this with basically all age groups, and it's everywhere from, “Okay, wow, I didn't realize I didn't know so much” — to, “I'm caught up in this 3D effect of being inside the system.” And most of the folks that are in it have never been in virtual reality before, so it's always pleasant to see their emotions the minute they turn it on.
It's all about the preparedness of it, not necessarily about throwing you into some sort of tornado disaster where your head is spinning the entire time. It's more getting you to think about what steps you can take and showing evidence that you can do these things and it might make you better prepared, safer, during any type of disaster. Changing their behavior in terms of preparedness. And that's where it gets a little bit sticky. We're still analyzing that data, but for the most part, I can tell you that afterwards, we had anecdotally, a lot of older adults coming up saying, “This is really great. I wish we could pair this with someone coming and giving us all the tools about what we can do in a disaster.” And that also gives us the indication that there are other mediums that may be very useful for the broader population in trying to get them to think about preparedness on a bigger scale.
Mike Nolan: It does seem like VR is moving more in this direction where I think a lot of people have that same thought as me, is like VR is a young person's thing. It's a thing people play with in video games, but it is kind of moving more into this serious space.
DeeDee Bennett Gayle: For virtual reality in the research space, older adults is kind of the bigger space where they've been using it. Other researchers have used it to look at dementia to help with falls with older adults. They've also used it to help with social isolation and to transport them into different locations that they may not be able to move around. And, consistently in all these different studies across all these different disciplines, it's been a useful tool. They've been happier, they enjoyed it more. They can come in and be upset about something, and then after they use it, their entire disposition has changed. So, the idea of using virtual reality with older adults has kind of been proven in a lot of different disciplines as a viable tool for a number of different reasons.
Mike Nolan: Let's transition to more of your broader work. So, you're the director of the Extreme Events, Social Equity and Technology Lab. What are some of the most important questions that your lab is trying to answer right now?
DeeDee Bennett Gayle: Wow. I think the biggest question is how can we reduce vulnerabilities among our society, and really focusing on some of the most marginalized populations during disasters. And the reason why we're doing that is because the research has shown that the people that are most severely impacted throughout every disaster seem to be the same groups of people, and those groups of people—older adults, people with disabilities, certain racial and ethnic minorities, children, sometimes it's women and gendered minorities, immigrants, people without transportation, rural population. I mean, I can keep going. It seems to be that that's more than 50% of our population. So, if we could just get these groups to be more resilient, less vulnerable during a disaster, it's actually going to help the entire society to get through the disasters and figure out how to best manage them.
If we keep ignoring these populations, or not getting the right tools to them, or figuring out what the right issue is to solve, then we're going to see this constant, over time draw in dollars, billions of dollars, and you're going to see large numbers of people who are casualties after a disaster, or displacement.
So, the bigger, broader question would be then, “How do advanced technologies reduce vulnerabilities among marginalized populations during disasters?”
Why do I think marginalized groups are ignored? I don't think it's purposeful. I think what's happening is that when I’ve gone to emergency managers in the past, and I've talked to them about the deaf population, unfortunately, we’re so data-driven in a certain way that we go, “How many are in my constituency? What percentage are we talking about in my constituency that are deaf or hard of hearing?” And that's the premise by which they start to throw resources at something.
When I tell you that something's going on with the deaf and hard of hearing population, but that might also help a whole bunch of other populations, maybe you're broadening your scope a little bit. But I think the idea is that we're so focused on each one of these groups singularly that we can't really solve any one of their problems because by themselves, they are a small portion of the general population that's being served. And it always seems like, “Well, I can't do that for the small amount of people when I need to do it for everyone.” But when you start to take a look at all of their issues and realize that there are similarities across them, then it becomes that, “Oh my gosh, I'm leaving out 50, 60% of the population by trying to do something for the majority.”
Mike Nolan: You testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging about the need to include older adults and people with disabilities in disaster management. Do you think your research could actually translate to real policy change?
DeeDee Bennett Gayle: The Senate hearing was a really precious experience for me. Just being able to do that. I have a kind of reverence for policymaking and the like. One of the things that stands out to me, that I still use even in classes today, is what I learned about, again, the same thought process: “Who's going to finance something that's just looking at older adults and people with disabilities?” And I remember that one of the other witnesses who was on the panel with me was talking about the fact that the U.S. spends so much money on services that seem like they’re social after a disaster, and was comparing us to a number of countries and how they do it differently. And they don't use a lot of social infrastructure money after disasters. The reason why Sweden and some of the other Scandinavian countries don't do that is because it's already built into their society.
They consider themselves a little bit more social than we are, and they have put in a lot of money in the day-to-day social aspects of life such that the emergency managers there just have to tap, “Hey, social services, you're up.” And they already have an arm of disaster response that can do it. So, they have all the financing there. It's not like they're coming from a deficit and then having to create something like we're doing consistently.
If each one of us takes the time to learn about the hazards in our area and be a little bit more prepared, it actually brings the overall cost down for our governments and society to help us after disasters because we'd have all the things that we need.
Erin Frick: That was Mike Nolan in conversation with Associate Professor of Emergency Management and Homeland Security DeeDee Bennett Gayle, who also holds the position of Associate Dean for Research at UAlbany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity.
To learn more about DeeDee’s work, including collaborative efforts to help coastal communities build climate resilience, and how her startup company is gamifying disaster preparedness, check out The Long(er) Version, in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people.
Scott Freedman provided audio production and editing from the UAlbany Digital Media studio deep inside the Podium tunnels.
Mike Nolan conducted this interview and contributed research.
We’ll be back next week with another short conversation about something interesting.