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William C. Bell, PhD

Senior Research Scientist Emeritus

Dr. William C. Bell is a Senior Research Scientist Emeritus at the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Institute for Disaster Management. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in the field of Geography with a Business minor, specializing in Micro-Meteorology at the doctoral level.

Dr. Bell then moved to Canada where he was a professor in Geography and Business Computing, with adjunct appointments in Soil Science, Mechanical Engineering and Plant Science in Manitoba, Canada. He was the Director of the Geographic Information Systems Laboratory and President of the Manitoba Organization of Faculty Associations. From there Dr. Bell worked on a five-year project in Egypt, culminating in the design, equipping and implementation of an applied computing Master’s program at the University of Alexandria.

Dr. Bell has held many positions including being the Vice-President at SNC-Lavalin where he designed, secured funding, tested and partially implemented the Manitoba Geospatial System. He worked for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, in Colombia, with projects throughout Central and South America, as a Senior Data Manager and later as Chief Information Officer. Dr. Bell then accepted a senior appointment at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Geneva. From there he was posted to several civil war countries in West Africa and Sudan to design and implement country wide systems for data collection, management, distribution and decision support for Geneva senior policy personnel.

He has been at the University of Georgia since 1999, first as Director of the Information Technology Outreach Services, and with the College of Public Health since its creation in 2005. Currently he works on the modeling and simulation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), focusing on casualty estimation and their management. His areas of expertise include simulation and modeling of WMD event impacts, meteorological effects on WMD events, geospatial systems and data management for WMD events, disaster exercise design and conduct, and the impact of blast, thermal and radiation.