Nick Norris is the Planning Director for the Salt Lake City. He is passionate about the City and is motivated to improve the quality of life for all of its citizens. Nick is constantly looking at improving how things are done and despises doing things “the way they have always been done.” He enjoys helping people find workable solutions to complex land use and development issues. Nick has been involved in a variety of planning activities in his career, including a strategic and measured update to the Salt Lake City zoning ordinance, working on people oriented development, preservation of sensitive lands and historic buildings, revamping the city’s master plan program, and leading an amazing team. At some point in the past, he became a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. When he is able to get away from the daily grind, Nick is usually relaxing his brain by spending his free time in the outdoors, running the trails in the foothills, biking up the canyons, or skiing in the backcountry (usually before the sun comes up). Nick graduated from the University of Utah and has been involved in urban planning since 2001.

Ibbi Almufti, SE, PE, PEng, is an Associate Principal in the Advanced Technology + Research group in Arup’s San Francisco office where he leads the Risk and Resilience practice. He is the outgoing City Resilience skills network leader for Arup Americas. Ibbi works at the intersection of design, risk, and resilience across multiple scales from buildings to campuses to utility infrastructure. He leads a multidisciplinary team which helps corporate, higher education, data center, healthcare, and government clients understand the physical and business impacts of natural and man-made hazards and develops resilience strategies integrating physical and operational measures to reduce risk. His specializations include probabilistic risk analysis, performance-based design, nonlinear seismic analysis, and risk-based resilience advisory. Ibbi led the development of the REDi™ Rating System which provides owners, architects and engineers a framework for implementing “resilience-based design”, a holistic design, planning, and risk verification approach for achieving “beyond-code” resilience objectives. The REDi downtime assessment method he developed has become adopted throughout the industry. He and his team are now developing similar guidelines for floods, hurricanes, and anti-terrorism. Ibbi serves on the FEMA/USGS Project 17 Committee and the Building Seismic Safety Council (BSSC), which determine acceptable risk targets for national building codes. In the past he has served on the LEED Resilience Working Group and the EERI Resilience Panel. Ibbi has been recognized as an industry expert on resilience topics and has spoken at major conferences and events around the world. He has published extensively to contribute to the field of earthquake engineering. He is a trusted source for news media including the New York Times, the Business Times, and Business Insider.

Managing Director Government Consultants LLC Municipal Administrator for the Magna Metro Township

Marissa Aho, AICP, has served as Houston’s Chief Resilience Officer for Mayor Sylvester Turner since February 2019. In this role she leads the resilience-building efforts for the City of Houston including the development and implementation of Living with Water Houston that was released in January 2020 and Resilient Houston, the city’s resilience strategy that was released in February 2020. Resilient Houston has 5 chapters, 18 goals and targets and 62 actions that address, among many challenges, flooding, climate change, inequity, housing affordability, and improved mobility. She previously served as Los Angeles’ first Chief Resilience Officer for Mayor Eric Garcetti beginning in 2015, where she led city-wide resiliency efforts, including those found in the Resilience By Design report and Resilient Los Angeles strategy which was released in March 2018. These efforts include implementation of historic building retrofits, fortifying the water infrastructure, and the release of the ShakeAlertLA earthquake early warning app. Prior she was an urban planning and land use consultant at two private firms in Los Angeles for 10 years. She serves on the global steering committee for the Global Resilient Cities Network. She also serves as an advisor to the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society. She developed and taught a graduate urban planning studio on resilience at University of Southern California Price School of Public Policy. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics and Government (CLEG) from The American University in Washington D.C. and a Master of Planning degree from the University of Southern California.