Christopher Clavin (Fed)

Christopher T. Clavin currently serves as the Senior Advisor for Resilience of the Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In this role, he leads and advises senior leadership in NIST’s Engineering Laboratory on initiatives to advance the resilience of the built environment to natural hazards and climate impacts. The Engineering Laboratory advances the resilience of the built environment through the development of guidance and tools to inform design practices for buildings and infrastructure systems to a range of natural hazards, and provides the basis to improve the standards and codes and community resilience and disaster recovery planning. Additionally, Mr. Clavin’s research in the Community Resilience Program focuses on the development and deployment of community-scale resilience planning methods and decision-making processes. He serves as the project lead for NIST’s Community Resilience Planning Guide project.

Mr. Clavin is an author of the Built Environment, Urban Systems, and Cities chapter of the Fifth National Climate Assessment. In 2024, Mr. Clavin was a recipient of an award given by the Office of Management and Budget for analysis, design, and implementation of the President’s response to the Climate Crisis. He is a co-recipient of the Department of Commerce’s Bronze Medal in 2023 in recognition of developing a science-based ASTM standard for community disaster resilience planning. In 2023, he received ASTM’s E60 Sustainability Award of Recognition for significant technical contributions in the creation of Standard E3341 - Standard for General Principles of Resilience. Mr. Clavin previously served as a reviewer for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Working Group II contribution and served on the American Geophysical Union’s Science and Society Section Executive Committee. 

Mr. Clavin joined NIST in 2019 as a Research Environmental Engineer in the Community Resilience Group. Recently, from 2022-2024, he served on detail at the Office of Management and Budget as Senior Policy Advisor for Climate Adaptation and Infrastructure Resilience. In this role, he was responsible for leading and designing the whole-of-government response to the President’s climate and resilience directives, establishing and implementing Climate-Smart Infrastructure Federal financial assistance policies, and leading the Federal government’s response to the Climate-Related Financial Risk Executive Order. Prior to joining NIST, Mr. Clavin was a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Science and Technology Policy Institute where he led research teams providing science policy analysis at the intersections of energy, environment, climate mitigation and adaptation, and community resilience.