Work to help communities prepare for and recover from natural disasters can continue thanks to the renewal of a $20 million partnership from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Dr. Maria Koliou, assistant professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is among Texas A&M University researchers working on the project known as the Center for Risk-based Community Resilience Planning, housed at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.
At Texas A&M, civil engineering and urban planning faculty help communities better prepare for and recover from natural disasters. The engineering contributions from Texas A&M to this center are led by Koliou.
“We will develop and refine models to quantify functionality and recovery of systems and communities with proactive and post-disaster actions,” she said. “This will support decision-making by community leaders and stakeholders to facilitate and expedite post-disaster recovery.”
Established in 2015, the group of researchers from 13 partner universities developed a free, open-source computer tool called Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE). Released in December 2019, this tool enables community resilience planners to model the physical and socio-economic systems of a community and assess the effectiveness of measures aimed at minimizing post-disaster disruption and recovery time.
The extension of the grant will allow work to continue developing computer and field study tools, best practices and guidance for local governments to decide how to invest the best resources intended to lessen the impact of extreme weather and other hazards on communities and to recover rapidly.
Project scholars from Texas A&M also include Dr. Shannon Van Zandt, head of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning; Dr. Michelle Meyer, director of the College of Architecture's Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center (HRRC); Dr. Maria Watson from the architecture urban planning faculty, Dr. Walter Peacock, HRRC senior research fellow; and Dr. Nathanael Rosenheim, HRRC associate research scientist.
Before the center's establishment, engineers and social scientists studied natural disaster resilience and recovery separately from distinctly different disciplinary angles. This center approached it comprehensively by forming interdisciplinary teams to develop IN-CORE.
The center's multi-disciplinary team includes experts in engineering, economics, data and computing, and social sciences from the California Polytechnic University in Pomona, Georgia Institute of Technology, Stony Brook University, Oregon State University, Portland State University, Rice University, Texas A&M, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Kansas, University of Oklahoma, University of South Alabama and the U.S. Naval Academy.
College of Architecture communications coordinator Richard Nira contributed to this article.