Christopher (CJ) Picard

Call me CJ. I have a master's degree in humanitarian and disaster psychology, as well as bachelor's degrees in psychology, international studies, and sociology. I have lived and worked around the United States and world in a number of challenging, dynamic, and culturally distinct places (China, Brazil, Panama, Iraq, Myanmar, Liberia, South Africa, and on). I am passionate about helping at-risk populations by identifying (in addition to known, prioritized problems) insidious and yet unidentified psychosocial and environmental problems, hazards, challenges, and operational inefficiencies in both pre and post disaster circumstances. I have a knack for identifying risk in all its forms and catching nuances in varieties of data that can better inform acute and long-range interventions. I seek meaningful work that demands I aggressively check my biases and proceed vigilantly - cognizant of my Western paradigms of wellness - yet encourages a headlong charge to vigorously address and mitigate the suffering of others by listening, learning, and ultimately leveraging individual, community, and environmental resiliency agents to facilitate recovery and capacity building for their future. I have skills that make me an ideal candidate for work in challenging environments, remaining calm under fire, acting with discretion, discerning subtle, salient issues of concern, applying academic, research, and relevant measurement and evaluation tools with rigueur, and communicating across disciplinary bounds and along the range of absolute professionalism to negotiations over tea.