Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell
President & CEO of the International Public Safety Data Institute
Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell is the President and CEO of the International Public Safety Data Institute. Lori began this role after serving 26 years as a senior executive in the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), responsible for frontline interaction with elected officers, executive board members, state, provincial and local chapter leaders and individual organization members throughout the U.S. and Canada. Lori is considered an expert in executive leadership, emergency response system evaluation, public safety resource deployment, community risk assessment, data collection and analysis, strategic planning, costs and benefits analysis, advocacy, consensus building, policy development and implementation and generational differences in the workplace.
Dr. Moore-Merrell serves on National and International Boards of Directors and advises elected officials, as well as chief executives at the national level and in local metropolitan jurisdictions in areas of her expertise while providing them scientific data to make fact-based decisions.
Dr. Moore-Merrell is an international speaker, presenter and author. She has been awarded the James O. Page Achievement award by the EMS Section of the IAFC (2001), the IAFC President’s Award for commitment to Firefighter Safety (2009), the Dr. John Granito Award for Excellence in Fire Leadership and Management Research (2010), and the Metropolitan Fire Chiefs President’s Award of Distinction (2013). Lori served nine years as a Commissioner to the Commission for Fire Service Accreditation (CFAI) and three terms as a board member for the Center for Public Safety Excellence (CPSE). Dr. Moore-Merrell is a member of the International Fire Service Training Association (IFSTA) Executive Board, as well as the UL Fire Council. She has completed four terms as a gubernatorial appointee to the Commonwealth of Virginia EMS Advisory Board and has served on the Public Safety Committee of the Transition Teams for both the Mayor of New York City (2013) and the Mayor of the District of Columbia (2015).
During her 26 years at the IAFF, Lori spent more than 15 years leading a research team made up of international fire service organizations and other partners including the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Underwriters Laboratory (UL), the Urban Institute, the University of Texas, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and the Commission on Fire Accreditation International. As principal investigator and senior project manager on projects funded by FEMA/ Assistance to Firefighters Grants totaling more than $22 Million, she led the team to produce landmark reports and other tools to improve Residential and High-Rise Fireground Operations, Community Risk Assessment, Fire and EMS Resource Deployment, and ‘Big Data Analytics’… all to help drive executive decision-making. These reports and other resources have changed the face of fire and EMS deployment in countries throughout the world.
Dr. Moore-Merrell has also managed emergency response system evaluation project teams, including secure data procurement, geographic information systems (GIS) analysis, and work load analysis in hundreds of fire departments throughout North America.
Dr. Moore-Merrell, along with a small group of fire service leaders recently founded the International Public Safety Data Institute (IPSDI) with a mission to assure that every local public safety agency can show their response capability, reliability, and operational performance using their own local data. www.i-psdi.org