Emergency Manager

CMU alumnus Douglas Owens helped lead response and recovery efforts during some of the country’s worst natural disasters

Every time Carnegie Mellon University alumnus Douglas Owens missed an important moment in his life, he was helping other people survive the worst moments in theirs.

Douglas is a former supervisory program manager for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He retired in 2023 after more than 30 years with the federal government.

At FEMA, Douglas led emergency response and relief efforts for major disasters like hurricanes and wildfires.

“I lost count of how many dinners, dates and whatever else I had to cancel at the last second because that was my priority, that was my job,” he says. “I had to set the tone and the pace and the expectation that when those things happen, you instantly respond and you respond until it matures enough to where you can hand it off to someone else.”

Douglas worked in logistics and supply chain management at the Department of Defense for 11 years before joining FEMA. He didn’t consider a career change until 2005, when FEMA asked for volunteers from other federal agencies to help them after Hurricane Katrina.

Douglas signed up right away, and the experience was life-changing.

 “I was just so moved by the fact that an entire federal agency didn't have the capacity to do the job it was tasked to do,” he says. “I decided then that I was going to join them.”

Path to Public Service

Douglas grew up in Washington, D.C., and Rochester, New York, where careers in public service were highly regarded.

“I came from a family and a community where that was very strongly encouraged,” he says. “Public service, at least where I grew up, was considered the noblest calling that you could have.”

He served in the Army for three years before attending the State University of New York at Brockport, where he received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. He then took a job as a shift commander in a correctional facility. Douglas enjoyed the work, but wanted to pursue a different career path.

He took a break to do some traveling, and ended up teaching English at a maritime academy in Poland. While there, he met a CMU alumna who convinced him to apply to graduate school at CMU.

“Let's just say I was provisionally accepted,” says Douglas, who received a master’s degree in public management from Heinz College. “The dean was most impressed with my background because I was a military veteran, I'd worked in law enforcement, I had done all these things, and so I had more real-world experience than the average student. He said, ‘We will conditionally accept you, but you have to take remedial math.’”

The math class was taught by Teaching Professor of Information and Decision Systems Janusz Szczypula, who was a teaching assistant at the time.

“He was great,” Douglas says. “He was the perfect TA. He said, ‘We're going to start from third grade math and work our way up to pre-calculus.’ And he did it.

“It was that intense, but it was absolutely necessary. By the time I graduated, you could give me any problem set, no matter what the topic was, and I could turn it into a mathematical equation. I might not be able to give you the answer, but I can sit there and say, this is how you solve this problem. That's what Carnegie Mellon teaches you.”

Douglas also had a head start on his career by the time he graduated.

He was selected for the Presidential Management Fellows Program, the federal government's premier leadership development program for advanced degree holders. The program matches outstanding graduate students with opportunities in the federal government. Douglas chose to work for the Department of Defense.

“I selected DOD because I wanted to travel,” Douglas says. “It seemed like the work they were doing was very interesting because at that time, supply chain management was not very well-known outside of industry. It intrigued me because I was doing a lot of operational science-type stuff when I was in grad school and was able to apply what I learned to that specific job.”

Prepared for the Worst

Douglas says CMU prepared him for difficult situations in the field.

He learned to use fundamental knowledge — like cause analysis — to solve complex problems, which was valuable in crisis situations.

“Katrina was a good test,” he says. “It was sort of like a trial by fire, or as we say, drinking from the fire hose. You're handed something and everybody's looking to you to solve it, regardless if you know anything about it. Carnegie Mellon prepares people very, very well for that.”

CMU also taught him to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

“I think that profoundly helped my career and my approach to it,” Douglas says. “I may not have been the most popular person in the room at times because my approach is different. People tend to want to overthink things or overreact. Taking a calm, measured approach and looking at it from a holistic perspective before taking action has really helped a lot."

“CMU is exactly what enabled me to do that.”