Matthew Malecha, PhD is a Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). His research focuses on community resilience to natural hazards—especially the roles of plans, policies, and regulations, and their interactions with underlying social and spatial characteristics. His work has been published in leading planning and hazards journals, including the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Natural Hazards Review, Land Use Policy, and the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. As a postdoc with NIST’s Community Resilience Group, Malecha is exploring community understanding and expectations of resilience, adaptation, and sustainability planning, using social science methods to investigate areas of overlap, barriers to action, and opportunities to improve effectiveness. During his graduate studies, he helped develop and refine the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard^TM (PIRS), a method for spatially evaluating community networks of plans and policies with respect to natural hazards. Dr. Malecha currently holds a Faculty Fellowship with the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center (HRRC) at Texas A&M University, where he has also served as an Instructional Assistant Professor, teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses in urban planning. He holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Sciences from Texas A&M University and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota. Before pursuing a doctorate, Malecha was a senior policy planner at the Minnesota Department of Transportation.