Madhu Beriwal
President and CEO
IEM President and CEO Madhu Beriwal has more than 25 years of experience in disaster and emergency management, homeland security, national defense, and the use of information technology to resolve complex protection issues.
Prior to founding IEM, she worked for the State of Louisiana, focusing on floodplain management and hurricane evacuations for the City of New Orleans and surrounding areas. In 1984, she received a Special Merit award from the Louisiana Emergency Preparedness Association for her achievements in hurricane emergency preparedness.
Ms. Beriwal founded IEM in 1985 as a company dedicated to developing solutions for complex challenges in homeland security, defense, and information technology. IEM’s strength lies in the combination of social, technical, and scientific knowledge with best practices management theory, as well as the use of open and participatory processes that accomplish real and sustainable results for governments, organizations, and individuals.
Ms. Beriwal was the corporate architect of “Hurricane Pam,” an innovative scenario-based exercise that drove catastrophic hurricane planning for 13 parishes and more than 300 participants in Southeastern Louisiana. Ms. Beriwal was invited to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in 2006 on the importance and relevance of "Hurricane Pam." In their 2006 report on Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Senate referred to "Hurricane Pam" as “a unique planning endeavor that resulted in functional plans that were … actually put to use in real-life situations before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.”
Recognizing a need to apply science and objectivity to public protection decisions, Ms. Beriwal was the first to develop and apply quantitative performance measures for one of the most challenging Federal protection programs prior to 9/11. She has provided corporate leadership for the creation of decision support tools that help officials at all levels save lives during technological hazards. These tools provide response recommendations for millions of possible scenarios, and reduce the time required to make response decisions.
Ms. Beriwal’s experience in defense includes measuring and improving preparedness and response for large-scale military programs, overseeing the development of simulation-based acquisition tools for billion-dollar chemical-biological defense programs, and developing frameworks for terrorism prevention and analysis and mitigation of insurgent actions overseas.
For more than two decades, she has been dedicated to the use of technology to enhance preparedness and response. She was involved with some of the earliest efforts by FEMA to integrate technology and emergency management, and taught courses in evacuation planning and the use of computers in emergency management at FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute. She also led an effort to develop response tools for a public protection program mandated by the EPA after the Bhopal disaster in 1984. Since then, she has played a key role in developing requirements analysis for multi-million dollar emergency management software tools, analyzing and recommending information technology staffing, and developing architecture and tools for simulation-based acquisition—all for protection programs with lifecycle budgets ranging to more than $2B. She has provided strategic direction for numerous modeling and simulation studies whose results drive policy, strategy, and investment decisions at the Federal, state, and local levels.
Ms. Beriwal is a guest lecturer at the Homeland Security Executive Leadership Program at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security in Monterey, California, and is a frequent speaker at conferences, such as the International Association of Emergency Managers conference and the World Conference on Disaster Management. She is a member of the prestigious Army Science Board (ASB), and a former member of the Defense Science Board’s Task Force for Intelligence-Gathering on Terrorism, created at the request of the DoD and the CIA to address counter-terrorism intelligence requirements for homeland defense. Ms. Beriwal was also the invited facilitator for the DoD’s Chemical and Biological Modeling and Simulation Futures Workshop, which examined strategic defense issues.
Ms. Beriwal holds a Master’s degree in Urban Planning (Transportation and Land Use) and a Bachelor’s degree in Geography and Economics.
