Lori Pennington-Gray
Endowed Professor, University of South Carolina, USA
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Lori Pennington-Gray is an internationally recognized scholar and academic leader whose work focuses on tourism crisis management, resilience, environmental risk, and community adaptation. She currently serves as an Endowed Professor and Director of the Richardson Family SmartState Center for Economic Excellence in Tourism and Economic Development at the University of South Carolina and is Co-Director of the Center for Clean Water and Healthy Ecosystems, a multidisciplinary initiative supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research.
Over the past decade, Dr. Pennington-Gray has established a global reputation for advancing science-based approaches that help destinations, institutions, and communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions such as pandemics, climate-related hazards, environmental contamination, and geopolitical instability. Her research integrates tourism planning, crisis communication, public health, and environmental risk, with a strong emphasis on translating scholarship into applied tools and policy-relevant insights.
Dr. Pennington-Gray’s scholarship bridges both the supply side of tourism systems—governance, preparedness, institutional capacity, and stakeholder coordination—and the demand side, examining how risk perceptions, trust, emotions, and information sources shape traveler and resident behavior. Her work has advanced theoretical and methodological innovations in resilience measurement, crisis communication, and risk perception, including the development of resilience indices and the co-authored Tripartite Model of Travel Risk Perceptions.
She has authored more than 140 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, with over 8,000 citations, an H-index of 48, and an i10-index of 99, reflecting sustained scholarly influence. Her research appears in leading journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, and International Journal of Hospitality Management. She is widely recognized for building collaborative research networks and mentoring graduate students, visiting scholars, and early-career faculty, often positioning trainees as lead authors to support their professional advancement.
Dr. Pennington-Gray has secured more than $6.4 million in external and internal research funding, including federal support from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, USAID, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Department of Education. Her funded projects span the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, addressing crisis preparedness, tourism recovery, evacuation behavior, water quality, and community resilience.
As a center builder and research leader, Dr. Pennington-Gray founded and directed the Tourism Crisis Management Initiative, internationally recognized as one of the most active and cohesive research networks in the field. Her current work increasingly emphasizes transformational resilience, focusing on equity, sustainability, and long-term adaptive capacity for destinations and communities facing persistent environmental and social change.
Professor Levent Altinay will share his experience of successful funding applications to the prestigious funding bodies including EU, Horizon, ESRC (Economic Social Research Council), Newton, British Academy, British Council and TUBITAK. During the workshop, Altinay will cover a wide range of topics including creative idea generation for research funding, formation of multidisciplinary research consortiums, use of networks, research design, dissemination of research findings and the generation of academically robust, practically meaningful research impact.