Research on Infrastructure and Community Resilience integrates social sciences with engineering to understand how infrastructure and communities respond to disasters. The impact of natural disasters is addressed in a holistic way, including relationships and dependencies among the various infrastructure sectors, as well as between such sectors and society. Emphasis is given to characterizing regional hazards, and quantifying uncertainties in the damage, decision making, and recovery process, resulting in a probabilistic understanding of infrastructure resilience.
Infrastructure resilience is co-dependent with community resilience, and socio-economic context is paramount. In addition, placing decision-making psychology within the context of the economic and infrastructure performance and the socio-cultural environment leads to interdisciplinary outcomes that can be integrated into infrastructure planning and public policy.
Current areas of research include:
- Probabilistic prediction of damage, decision, and recovery of interdependent infrastructure systems
- Social dynamics of decision-making and its effects on economic and infrastructure recovery
- Interactions between communities and infrastructure managers
