Elizabeth (Liz) Asche, Ph.D. is the Assistant Administrator of the Federal Insurance Directorate and the senior executive of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) within FEMA’s Office of Resilience. In this role, Dr. Asche heads the world’s largest single-peril insurance provider, which serves approximately 4.7 million policyholders nationwide and receives over $3.9 billion in premium payments.
Liz is a seasoned emergency management professional with a passion for helping all people recover from and mitigate the effects of future disasters. She joined FEMA in 2015 after pursuing a Ph.D. in economics, focused on flood insurance, at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
During her prior service in the NFIP, Liz led several consequential initiatives, including the development and delivery of the Agency’s Flood Insurance Affordability Framework and initial OpenFEMA publication. Across various roles, she embraced customer-centric innovation, promoted data driven decision-making, and played an integral role in the development of the NFIP’s System of Record modernization.
Since joining the Senior Executive Service in 2022, Liz served as the Deputy Director of FEMA’s Individual Assistance (IA) program. In this role, she strategically worked to improve the disaster survivor experience implementing the most significant advancement of IA regulations in the past 20 years in dozens of natural disasters across the country. She also led the transformative redesign of the disasterassistance.gov registration process and enhanced the transitional sheltering assistance website.
Dr. Asche returns to her roots at Federal Insurance at a time when natural catastrophes, especially flooding, continue to play an outsized role in emergency management. The extreme weather events now routinely disrupt thousands of American lives both physically and financially. Utilizing two decades of extensive knowledge from studying to leading hazard mitigation, financial risk transfer, disaster risk management, and disaster recovery, Liz is eager to engage a new team to close the flood insurance gap, improve the policyholder experience, and reduce the suffering caused by Flooding – the nation’s costliest and most common natural disaster.
When she’s not working, Liz enjoys gardening and traveling with her daughter Natalie, husband Mike, and American Bulldog, Cascadia.