Resilience Research
Sandra Sydnor, assistant professor of hospitality and tourism management, is looking at how communities and businesses rebound from disasters.
Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. Sandra Sydnor is talking on the phone, watching the “Today” show in the background.
“I thought I was watching a trailer for a disaster movie,” she says. “That day was a game-changer for me, as well as the country. I felt vulnerable. I had no sense of how to protect my children and myself. Little by little, as information came out, I began thinking about disasters and how people deal with devastating events. It was an intersection of the personal and the professional in my life.”
Sydnor, now an assistant professor in HTM, says the events of Sept. 11 and other disasters — both natural and man-made — have informed her academic work and research these past 10 years.
Sydnor’s primary research interests focus on the hospitality industry and how businesses survive, grow and decline — particularly after disasters and crises. Her work, “Weathering the Storm: Firm Resilience Under Sudden Change,” was nominated for the Best Paper Award at the 2011 I-CHRIE (International Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education) Annual Conference.
