Ameya Pawar

Who is Ameya Pawar?

Ameya Pawar, was elected to the Chicago City Council as an Alderman of the 47th Ward of the City of Chicago in the 2011 municipal elections held on February 22, 2011 and is the first Indian American and Asian American in Chicago City Council history. He succeeded Eugene Schulter who had been the Alderman of the 47th Ward since 1975. Prior to his election, Pawar was on staff at Northwestern University in the Office of Emergency Management. At Northwestern, he was responsible for the development of a university-wide business continuity program.

While working at Northwestern, he and two of his classmates from the University of Chicago were awarded a contract from Taylor and Francis to write a textbook based on their work in emergency management. The textbook is based on a model Ameya developed with two of his classmates at the University of Chicago’s MSTRM program — the model is called Social Intelligence. Their work calls for the real-time aggregation of data to develop composite views of communities to better inform emergency preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery activities. Pawar and his co-authors have presented their work at annual Federal Emergency Management Agency conferences and other national conferences since 2008. He holds a M.S. in Threat and Response Management from the University of Chicago and a Master's degree in Public Administration from the Illinois Institute of Technology.