Emergency response capability and medical preparedness are necessary features of any community or nation. This symposium highlights scientific and technological advances in engineering and information science and their roles in disaster preparedness and emergency response. Massive data collection of pre-earthquake inventory and post-event damage can be carried out using ever more sophisticated and ubiquitous sensing devices. The session outlines an open source model for collecting such data and developing tools to globally assess seismic risk. With an abundance of first-hand citizen knowledge shared via social media technologies—along with updates, advisories, and directives from official government sources and data automatically collected by technical means—methods for collecting, combining, managing, sampling, and analyzing such disparate data must be advanced.  The session also highlights advances in critical thinking and credibility evaluation in improving social media for disaster response. Effective disaster mitigation and response efforts require real-time information-decision support technology that can rapidly assess the situation and identify people in immediate danger, and swiftly communicate to citizens actions to be taken for their safety and the safety of others. The session describes modeling and computational advances in the development of a real-time dynamic adaptive tool for emergency operations and multi-stakeholders and on-the-ground coordination.