Rae Zimmerman

Rae Zimmerman is an American risk analyst, teacher, and author, currently at New York University and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Rae lived in Brooklyn as a child, and was interested in the arts, science, and geology. She attended the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s and got a B.A. in chemistry, then earned a Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in planning from Columbia University. Her doctoral work focused on industrial water pollution.

She taught graduate-level courses in risk management and the environmental movement in the 1970s, and received a grant from the National Science Foundation in 1980. She was president of the Society for Risk Analysis from 1996 to 1997, and received awards from it for "extraordinary achievement in risk analysis pertaining to the planning and operations of infrastructure systems"