Lucia Castro Herrera

Lucia is a PhD candidate at the Information Systems department at the University of Agder, Norway. She holds an MSc. In Engineering Management with a concentration in Crisis, Emergency and Risk Management from The George Washington University, and a BA in Government and International Relations from Universidad Externado de Colombia. Her research interests include crisis, disaster and risk management, social media in the context of crisis communications, logistics, and process improvement. Apart from academia, Lucia counts with professional experience in process improvement and emergency management with international, private, and public organizations in multicultural and multidisciplinary environments.  

Her research explores the organizational practice around information collection from social media in the context of crises. This practice, known as social media listening/monitoring, has become increasingly important in emergency management and is an emerging research interest in the Information Systems discipline.

The main objective of the project is to understand how these social media listening practices are configured within crisis management strategies and their potential for future improvement.

Social media listening is understood as gathering, analyzing, synthesizing, and reporting information harvested from social media in crisis management operations before, during, and after crises.