Stephen Flynn

Biography

Stephen Flynn is the founding director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University, where he leads a major universitywide initiative to undertake applied transdisciplinary research to inform and advance societal resilience. At Northeastern, he is also a professor of political science with faculty affiliations in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs.  

Flynn is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on community and infrastructure resilience. He has been leading teams in conducting post-disaster community and infrastructure resilience assessments, initially with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and then from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. With support from the U.S. Economic Development Administration and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA, he leads domestic and international projects that inform how economic development can be undertaken to advance community resilience, sustainability, and equity.   

Before joining Northeastern’s faculty in 2011, Flynn served as president of the Center for National Policy. Prior to that he spent a decade as a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.   

Flynn has presented expert congressional testimony before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives on more than 30 occasions.  He has delivered keynote addresses at more than 100 international and national conferences. Flynn is a frequent media commentator and has appeared on Meet the Press, 60 Minutes, The News Hour, The Today Show, and CNN and on National Public Radio.  He has written two of the most widely-cited books on homeland security: The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation (Random House, 2007) and America the Vulnerable (HarperCollins 2004).  Five of his articles have been published in the prestigious journal, Foreign Affairs. Excerpts of his books have been featured in Time, as the cover story for U.S. News & World Report, and as the subject of two CNN documentaries.  

In March 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine appointed Flynn as chair of the congressionally-mandated committee to assess the adequacy of strategies related to the nuclear terrorism threat. Additionally, he holds an appointment as a guest scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  

Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Flynn served as an expert advisor to U.S. Commission on National Security (Hart-Rudman Commission), and following the 9/11 attacks, he was the executive director of a blue-ribbon Council on Foreign Relations homeland security task force, again co-led by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman.  He served as the principal advisor to the bipartisan Congressional Port Security Caucus, advised the Bush Administration on maritime and homeland security issues, and after the November 2008 election of President Barack Obama, served as the lead policy advisor on homeland security as a part of the presidential transition team. From 2003 to 2010 he served as a member of the National Research Council’s Marine Board.   

A 1982 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Flynn served in the Coast Guard on active duty for 20 years, including two tours as commanding officer at sea. As a Coast Guard officer, he served in the White House Military Office during the George H.W. Bush administration and as a director for global issues on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration. He was a Guest Scholar in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution from 1991 to 1992, and in 1993-94 he was an Annenberg Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Master of Arts in law and diplomacy and his doctorate from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, in 1990 and 1991 and in 2009, he received an honorary doctorate of laws from Monmouth University.