Patrick Pope is a Certified Internal Auditor who serves as an Assistant Chief Administrative Officer for the Howard County Department of County Administration. Mr. Pope has a combined 10 years of local governmental experience, including previous roles in the legislative branch, and the school system. Those experiences provide a broad and invaluable perspective to the day-to-day responsibilities of an ACAO.
In Mr. Pope’s previous career, he was a professional international basketball player for 9 years, with stops in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic.
Mr. Pope is a proud HBCU graduate, with an accounting degree from Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh, NC. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with his wife and two sons, watching sports, exercising, and cooking.
Maria Bernadzikowski is the Director of the Howard County Office of Emergency Management (OEM). Mrs. Bernadzikowski joined Howard County Government as a Disaster Recovery Specialist following the 2016 Ellicott City Flood, serving in various leadership positions in OEM before being recruited to serve as the County’s Assistant Chief Administrative Officer, where she developed and oversaw all policies and procedures for County Administration, as well as initiatives related to public safety, climate, and the environment. In 2023, she was dually appointed as the Director of OEM by the Governor of Maryland and Howard County Executive.
Mrs. Bernadzikowski has worked in the emergency management and community resilience spaces for over a decade, managing and working across each emergency management program and phase during her tenure in the field. She has a background in strategic planning, policy development, change management, and multi-agency coordination, with experience related to whole-community recovery work in response to multiple federally declared disasters. Additionally, she has developed and implemented resilience programs focused on communities at increased risk from the impacts of disasters in the cities of New Orleans (LA), Jamaica (NY), Port-au-Prince (Ouest, HT), and the town of Léogâne (Ouest, HT).
Mrs. Bernadzikowski is a graduate of St. John’s University (BA, Government and Politics) and Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, where she earned a Master of Public Health with a concentration in Disaster Management. She is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM), Master Business Continuity Professional (MBCP), Climate Change Professional (CC-P), and a Nationally Qualified Planning Section Chief on the Maryland Incident Management Team. She was Howard County Government’s 2020 Employee of the Year and in 2025, she was recognized as one of the International Association of Emergency Manager’s “40 Under 40” Awardees for outstanding contributions in the field.
