Tracy L. Kijewski-Correa, Ph.D. - US grants

Abstract:

Despite the prevalence of high-rise developments worldwide, issues associated with the design of these oftentimes slender, flexible structures were perhaps not fully underscored to the wider Structural Engineering community prior to the recent recommendations of the NIST NCSTAR 1, WTC Investigation. In particular, these structures are governed by a unique set of design limit states that encompass not only survivability and serviceability but also habitability, which all must be satisfied in increasingly complex wind environments. In fact, even though the performance of these structures affects the safety and comfort of a large number of people, their design continues to be based on analytical and scaled models that were not systematically validated in full-scale prior to a monitoring program instituted recently in the City of Chicago, which established a multi-faceted, international team to address the problem. This team, in concert with NIST?s Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL), will lead the proposed study, building upon the current efforts in Chicago to expand the collection of structural systems and material types studied, while introducing computational models correlated with rooftop anemometers to capture wind field characteristics over urban environments, to aid in the full-scale validation of predictions made in the design of tall buildings. Not only will the proposed study provide substantive information with respect to this correlation and create an important venue for the development of future prediction techniques, but also more importantly it will provide a unique infrastructure to respond to the NIST NCSTAR 1 Group 1 Recommendations. This response encompasses the following objectives: (1) Develop & Install Advanced Networked Instrumentation; (2) Estimate Building Drift & Acceleration; (3) Develop & Validate a Computational Wind Field Model; (4) Validate Performance Using Full-Scale Data; and (5) Develop Recommendations for Building Drift & Acceleration Limit States.

Abstract for Kijewski-Correa, EEC-0552432:

This REU award for a Site the Interdisciplinary Studies in Tsunami Impacts on Mitigation (ISTIM) supports 10 undergraduates each year for three years in a 10-week summer program at the University of Notre-Dame. During the first 8 weeks of the program, students will be engaged in research projects as well as enrichment activities at Notre Dame. At the conclusion, of the 8 weeks, the students will get the opportunity to present their findings in symposium through posters and oral presentations. The last two weeks of the program will involve travel to the NEES tsunami-simulation site (Corvallis, OR), followed by an investigational trip to tsunami- affected areas in Thailand. The students will have the opportunity to interact with those involved in humanitarian recovery efforts and issues of social concern. Through such interactions the students will be exposed to the ethical/humanitarian/social context of their research as it relates to disaster recovery.

Intellectual Merit: The Interdisciplinary Studies in Tsunami Impacts and Mitigation (ISTIM) program will encompass geotechnical, and environmental engineering as well as geophysical, which will emphasize the need for multidisciplinary collaboration to improve natural hazards and risk assessment and mitigation. Successful completion of the proposed projects has the potential to improve predictions of areas that could be affected by tsunamis, improve our understanding of triggering mechanisms for tsunamis, result in recommendations for improved housing in tsunami-prone areas, provide methods to quickly repair damage resulting from such events, and improve existing methods of remediating the environmental hazards following such events.

Broader Impacts: The ISTIM REU site program will give undergraduates the opportunity to integrate research into their education as well as increase the participation of underrepresented groups in science and engineering. Also, the REU site has the potential to benefit society by reducing the damage that could result from natural hazards, such as tsunamis, in the US as well as internationally.

This REU site is supported by the Department of Defense (DoD) in partnership with the NSF REU program.

Proposal Number: CBET-0742191
Principal Investigator: Kareem, Ahsan
Affiliation: University of Notre Dame
Proposal Title: VORTEX-Winds: A Virtual Organization for Reducing the Toll of EXtreme Winds on Society

Wind-related catastrophes inflict enormous devastation on the built environment and result in a staggering number of fatalities, which may continue to rise in the future given the increase in exposure as population migrates towards the coasts. To better manage the impact of extreme wind events, given the heavy reliance on empirical and experimental information in the design process, a new paradigm is required that utilizes shared resources and global collaborations. In order to address this critical issue, a Virtual Organization for Reducing the Toll of EXtreme Winds (VORTEX-Winds) is proposed that would enable such a paradigm shift by offering real-time shared access to geographically dispersed resources for more effective research and education in the area of wind effects on structures. The goals of this proposal are (i) to establish and sustain such a virtual community for wind hazard mitigation; (ii) to enhance this community?s analysis and design capabilities to address next generation challenges posed by wind; and (iii) to facilitate education and training of the future workforce in the field.

Through a collection of tools and services networked with a flexible architecture and interfaces to support research and education objectives in real-time, VORTEX-Winds promises to enhance the capability of its members and end users beyond their current resources through a synergistic, integrative approach to understanding and modeling wind-structure interactions. Thus, VORTEX-Winds will benefit those otherwise limited by their personal research tools, allowing them to address complex problems posed by wind in support of the wider stakeholder community.

Meanwhile, and perhaps more importantly, VORTEX-Winds will bring the analytical muscle currently lacking in the design industry?s next generation electronic information/data interchange platform, Building Information Modeling (BIM), to strengthen the competitive edge of its end users involved in the burgeoning infrastructure development around the world and ensure its safety and performance in extreme wind events. In addition, the EVO will offer an interactive knowledge base intended to aggregate and centralize the shared knowledge of the collaboratory, including a wind-wiki, damage database, help desk/FAQ, bulletin boards and curriculum tools to facilitate dissemination and education. The result will be a community as a whole better positioned to address the next frontiers in the field.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI)

Proposal Number: 0941565
PI: Tracy Kijewski-Correa
Institution: University of Notre Dame
Title: CDI-Type II: Open Sourcing the Design of Civil Infrastructure (OSD-CI)

In this project, a virtual organization (VO) is proposed that would allowing all stakeholders engineers, public officials, researchers, students, and even the public at-large to engage as "Citizen Engineers" to rehabilitate our nations deteriorating civil infrastructure. To this end, the award will address four dimensions of collaboration: harnessing human effort, tapping collective knowledge, pooling communal software and leveraging distributed computational hardware. Linux and Wikipedia serve as evidence that loosely organized teams can create and maintain the complex technical and intellectual infrastructure upon which society increasingly depends. These projects have succeeded not by accepting participants indiscriminately, but by creating a meritocracy that rewards expertise regardless of its source.

OSD-CI is devised as a way that essential public-works projects could benefit similarly from the full expertise and latest advances available in the wider engineering community. The VO will use an archival Design Gallery, a Social Network, and a Tool Repository within an integrated cyberinfrastructure. The investigators expect that new types of discovery, education and engineering innovation will emerge to address the challenges facing civil infrastructure in an unprecedented fashion. Furthermore, the policies that result from this project are expected to define a new level of task complexity for problem-solving by crowds, thus providing a platform for new discoveries, insights and theories on the design and effectiveness of VOs that require extreme trustworthiness and openness.

By addressing challenges facing civil infrastructure with OSD-CI, there will be direct benefits to society reliant on this infrastructure. Furthermore, the social fabric of the OSD-CI Collaboratory provides a new paradigm for engaging the public at large in the research and design enterprise. It will offering new means of collaboration and networking among "Citizen Engineers." In addition, it will also aid education and mentoring of students worldwide, particularly those in developing areas lacking access to such opportunities locally. Eventually, OSD-CI is envisioned to become a virtual Town Hall where members of the public interface with decision makers, engineers, architects and planners to contribute to processes directly impacting them and their communities. Once the precedent is set, these open-source communal concepts could be extended to other fields as a basic framework and model for the effective use of VOs for addressing societal challenges.

A typical building must be in use for decades before the energy expended in its daily operations surpasses the energy embodied within its initial construction. Thus, how a sustainable building is constructed is as important as how it is operated over its lifetime. Unfortunately, the environmental impact of building construction has only recently been considered by design consultants, quantified by the energy expended in the manufacture of the materials employed. By considering only the materials' 'cradle' and not the 'cradle-to-grave' environmental impact, these evaluations fail to quantify the true impact of US building construction practices. In addition, each building has specific vulnerabilities, whose implications for sustainability has not been previously considered, despite the significant environmental impact of repairs after a disaster. This project will develop an integrated life-cycle analysis that responds to the complex relationship between sustainability and resilience. This research will help the US building industry realize designs with truly optimal performance. Doing so will advance the global mandate to reduce environmental impact and better steward of natural resources. Moreover, this project's adoption of established modeling environments, real world case studies, and private sector partnerships will aid in the effective translation to US design practice. The project's educational crossover opportunities will ensure that future design professionals are well equipped to further this legacy by using the outcomes of this research to enhance resilience and sustainability of our built environment.

This project will develop an integrated life-cycle assessment capturing the dependencies between multi-hazard resilience and sustainability, across the multiple contributing dimensions of environmental impact. The computationally efficient assessment will take advantage of (i) simulation-driven approaches, (ii) sample-based tools, (iii) soft-computing techniques, and (iv) new environmental impact toolsets that will mine publically available data to quantify the building's operational and embodied energy. Through sensitivity analyses on actual buildings, the framework will reveal which design aspects truly drive environmental impact and how this is affected by the consideration of lifetime exposure. The transfer of this newfound understanding is further facilitated by engaging practicing engineers and architects directly in the research effort.

This grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) will enable a team of wind, coastal, and structural engineers from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Florida to conduct a forensic analysis across the Tiburon Peninsula of Haiti to examine the performance of low-rise construction during the October 2016 Hurricane Matthew. Strengthening community resilience to natural disasters depends critically on improving construction practices across a private sector dominated by low-rise buildings. This issue becomes particularly urgent for coastal communities, where hurricane risk is escalating under changing sea levels and climate conditions. Historically, masonry load bearing wall systems had served as a trusted mode of low-rise construction in such settings. For example, builders in the southeastern United States commonly use masonry for churches, schools, commercial buildings, and even residences. Despite their popularity, the vulnerabilities in these systems to natural hazards can be significant, particularly within states that have yet to enact statewide minimum building standards. Regrettably, these vulnerabilities are only revealed under extreme wind, wave, and storm surge loads associated with the passage of major hurricanes. This makes the forensic analysis of building failures during major hurricanes a critical source of knowledge to improve the design state-of-the-art.

The passage of Hurricane Matthew over Haiti in October 2016 provides an opportunity to conduct a forensic analysis of low-rise masonry building performance under one of the most significant hurricanes in recent history. This setting includes construction preferences that facilitate unique comparative analyses of variables known to influence performance of masonry buildings under wind, wave, and storm surge. Moreover, the fact that portions of Haiti have recently undergone reconstruction, following the devastating January 2010 earthquake in that country, with greater vigilance toward seismic detailing, furthers the potential for impact, as there has been no prior opportunity in the United States to explore the in-situ performance of structures under multiple significant hazards in a limited time period (strong earthquake followed by major hurricane). Through a combination of aerial and ground-based techniques, the multi-institutional team will collect perishable data to answer the following questions: (1) How did traditional masonry structural systems perform under hurricane wind, wave, and storm surge? (2) How did the new structural systems that have emerged in response to the 2010 earthquake and aseismically detailed traditional masonry systems perform in this major hurricane? (3) How does the performance of traditional masonry load bearing walls in Hurricane Matthew compare to that observed in the 2010 earthquake? How can this inform future multi-hazard designs? These insights will contribute to advancing more resilient, multi-hazard construction practices to reduce future losses of life and property.

Strengthening community resilience to natural disasters is important in all communities, including in the residential sector. In some instances, homeowners may survive a hazard event yet still experience significant direct and indirect losses that, when aggregated over entire communities, can impede recovery following major disasters. Reduction of future losses may require homeowners to undertake voluntary actions to reduce risks to their residences. This research will focus on the role of social and cultural factors, including religiosity, in motivating homeowners to be proactive. This research will conduct homeowner surveys in two Haitian communities whose residential sectors were respectively devastated by 2016's Hurricane Matthew and the 2010 Earthquake. Understanding the attitudes and behaviors of these extremely vulnerable homeowners can in turn inform efforts to encourage proactive risk reduction among similar communities in the United States. Such findings will inform the development of programming enabling cultural and social institutions to move beyond their historical roles as key actors in response and recovery and become drivers of proactive risk reduction.

Homeowner decisions to reduce risk to natural hazards like hurricanes and earthquakes are likely constrained by complex social, economic, and political forces, including the role of important social and cultural institutions. The specific practices of these institutions may vary considerably even within those of a particular type, and may be associated with corresponding differences in the posture of adherents towards various hazards. The recent (e.g., Hurricane Katrina) and more distant history of US disasters has shown, for example, that institutional affiliation may inform risk seeking/avoidance behavior. This study pays particular attention to the role of religiosity in determining homeowner agency to rebuild for resiliency. Other variables tested for their effects on risk-reducing homeowner behavior include the severity of prior disaster damage (quantified by engineering forensic assessments), perceptions of future natural hazard risk, and time elapsed since prior disaster experience. Data used in this investigation will be generated from face-to-face homeowner surveys distributed to 500 primary decision makers of single family residences in each of the two demographically similar communities in Haiti, Les Cayes and Leogane. Residents of Les Cayes are in the early stages of recovery following 2016's Hurricane Matthew, where intent toward risk reducing construction can be documented. By contrast, respondents in Leogane, the epicenter of the 2010 Earthquake, have had six years to navigate the steps of rebuilding and demonstrate actions toward risk reduction, allowing a comparative evaluation between intent and action in household recovery. Given the lack of accurate census data for random sampling, respondents are selected through modified random walk protocols. Data analysis includes basic descriptive statistics (frequencies and cross-tabs) for the two communities and multivariate analysis on the Structural Risk Mitigation Index, a quantitative indicator of the homeowner's proactive response toward resilience-enhancing construction.

Post-disaster, rapid response research reconnaissance is one of the most powerful means to understand the effects of natural hazards on the nation's built environment. The structural engineering community's ability to advance windstorm design and construction methodologies is greatly informed by systematically documenting the performance of residential homes, buildings, and other civil infrastructure under actual hazard conditions. The 2017 hurricane season has been an especially unprecedented venue for such investigations. The season included Hurricane Irma, the most powerful Atlantic Hurricane on record, sustaining 185-mph winds and Category 5 status longer than any prior storm. Irma left a path of considerable destruction across the Caribbean. The U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico were exposed to Irma's full Category 5 strength, claiming three lives and compromising basic infrastructure in Puerto Rico, while delivering staggering damage to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Irma eventually made its first landfall in the continental U.S. on Cudjoe Key in southern Florida early on Sunday, September 10, 2017, passing just 20 miles from Key West with Category 4 winds that reached 130 miles per hour. Irma downgraded to a Category 3 storm as it made its second landfall later that afternoon on Marco Island, just south of Naples on Florida's Gulf Coast, with sustained winds near 120 miles per hour. Irma continued to move northward along Florida's Gulf Coast, weakening to a Category 2 storm and eventually to a Tropical Storm. Even in its weakened state, Irma claimed 26 lives, crippled power infrastructure, destroyed roofs, and instigated structural failures across the state of Florida, including the widely publicized failures of multiple construction cranes in Miami. The widespread infrastructure damage from Irma provides a valuable real-world testbed for structural wind and coastal engineers, as well as the building industry as a whole, to document infrastructure performance and damage data to advance understanding of hurricane-resistant design and construction practices in the United States. Under this Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID), a central coordination node at the University of Notre Dame will link a network of regional nodes at universities across Florida and Puerto Rico (Florida Institute of Technology, Florida International University, University of Florida, and University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez), to orchestrate a wide-spread structural wind and coastal engineering reconnaissance effort in the weeks following Hurricane Irma to capture this valuable perishable damage data. Data obtained from this field work will be organized and documented, through a data node at Auburn University, and then shared with other researchers through the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Data Depot (https://www.designsafe-ci.org).

In this RAPID study, teams of researchers and students will form around each regional node to survey and document structural damage and other storm impacts from Hurricane Irma in four waves targeting Florida's Atlantic Coast, its Gulf Coast, its Keys, and the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The extensive domestic footprint of this investigation will allow researchers to study a range of hurricane-driven hazards from Category 5 to Tropical Storm intensities in order to respond to critical questions surrounding: (1) the performance of distinctive construction practices in these regions for a range of building and infrastructure classes, paying particular attention to the performance of Floridian practices regarded as a leader in resilient coastal construction, (2) the effectiveness of current mitigation strategies and enhanced building design methods, (3) the impact of recurring storm events on failure probabilities for homes exposed to both Hurricanes Matthew (2016) and Irma (2017), and (4) the performance of new building envelope technologies against water intrusion. This effort will further build the capacity of the structural wind engineering research community to rapidly organize and deploy post-disaster investigation teams by developing: (1) policies and data standards for effective geographically-distributed reconnaissance, (2) digital workflows that can enable the swift capture and curation of perishable data, and (3) public engagement mechanisms to crowdsource damage assessments.

Over 39 percent of the US population live in coastal shoreline counties exposed on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts to meteorological hazards like hurricanes and on the Pacific Coast to geophysical hazards like earthquakes and tsunamis. Meanwhile, much of the remaining population at the interior of the country is subject annually to the damaging effects of thunderstorm downbursts and tornadoes, in addition to the looming threats of potentially catastrophic earthquakes. Concentrating property and human life in some of the country's most hazard-prone areas inevitably results in catastrophic losses, as powerfully illustrated by the 2017 Hurricane season's sequence of Harvey, Irma, and Maria, which caused the highest insured losses ever. Each disaster provides an important opportunity to evaluate the performance and vulnerabilities of buildings and other constructed civil infrastructure that led to dramatic losses of life and property. Research (knowledge) advances to reduce risks to civil infrastructure from natural hazard events are strongly guided and informed by field evidence documenting the performance of the built environment after the event. As natural disasters occur with little warning, reconnaissance teams must immediately mobilize over large geographical areas to gather large quantities of perishable research data on civil infrastructure performance that must be effectively captured through a finite number of field observations. While the National Science Foundation uses the Grants for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) funding mechanism to support structural engineering researchers to collect post-event perishable data, the response of the structural engineering community to such extreme events has been ad hoc, leading to slowed in-field response times, uncoordinated data collection, and missed opportunities to maximize learning from disasters. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) responds to this challenge by establishing the Structural Extreme Event Reconnaissance (StEER) network to coordinate the structural engineering research community's rapid response to natural disasters and build its capacity for more effective, systematic, and consistent post-disaster RAPID reconnaissance and data collection. The goal is to use the event data collected for subsequent research investigations to reduce risks to constructed civil infrastructure and thus promote national welfare and prosperity by saving lives and reducing property losses in future disasters.

This EAGER will guide the community-led design and launch of the StEER network and establish its mission to (1) promote community-driven standards, best practices, and training for coordinated RAPID field work, (2) represent the vision of the structural reconnaissance community outwardly to other aligned organizations, and (3) coordinate official event responses in collaboration with other stakeholders. StEER will be founded upon regional nodes that provide convening points to give voice to the needs of the windstorm and earthquake engineering communities, while establishing common ground to foster interaction between them. These nodes more importantly will enable swift and cost-effective response to disasters. Creating a single point of coordination for the structural engineering research community will also enable better connectivity with the wider established extreme events (EE) consortium in geotechnical engineering and social sciences to foster greater potentials for truly interdisciplinary reconnaissance. StEER will be operationalized through the following objectives: (1) establish its governance structure, policies and data standards to enable more effective, coordinated field reconnaissance by leveraging its geographically distributed network; (2) implement standard workflows for a wide array of assessment technologies to swiftly and reliably capture, curate and disseminate large volumes of perishable research data; (3) increase the community's capacity for high-quality damage assessments through standardization, rigorous quality assurance, and web-based training programs; (4) foster greater collaboration across hazard and disciplinary boundaries through coordination and blended reconnaissance efforts within the wider EE consortium; and (5) promote broad dissemination of high-quality reconnaissance findings to diverse audiences to benefit researchers, practitioners, students, and the public-at-large. StEER will also coordinate its reconnaissance with the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) RAPID facility and its data archiving with the NHERI cyberinfrastructure Reconnaissance Portal (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

This study examines the perspectives and decisions of homeowners who reside in coastal communities that are subject to extreme weather events, such as hurricanes. Residents have opportunities to strengthen their homes against the risk of hurricanes, and the decisions to make these investments depend in part on their assessments of the risks and possible consequences. To make informed decisions, homeowners need to know not only the risks of extreme weather, but also how different types of homes and building materials are impacted by extreme weather. In order to assess the cognitive basis for these decisions, the researchers aim to assess perspectives and experiences via a diverse, representative survey of homeowners in a coastal region that includes residents who have been directly impacted by hurricanes. This study supports the development of sustainable residential infrastructure in regions that are subject to extreme weather. The study also provides opportunities for the training of graduate students in the methods of scientific data collection and analysis.

By drawing on interdisciplinary methods and data archives, this project develops a new methodological framework that identifies features of homes in the study region, the damage they sustained in a hurricane, and the inferred characteristics of residential households. Equipped with these data, which allow for robust sampling methods, the researchers aim to administer a standardized survey with modules suitable for testing site-specific and event-specific hypotheses regarding homeowner decision processes following a major hurricane. These sampling and survey data enable researchers to efficiently deploy this methodology following major hurricanes across different coastal communities. The responses of survey participants allow the researchers to examine multiple research questions. For instance, do homeowners perceive the risk of catastrophic loss, or have building codes unintentionally fostered a false sense of security? How do experiences of direct losses versus indirect impacts influence risk perceptions and voluntary uptake of enhanced construction standards among homeowners? How do household economic and social dynamics influence the decision to reduce hurricane risks through enhanced construction standards? The answers to these questions can help local stakeholders to craft policies that incentivize homeowners to strengthen residential infrastructure in areas that are subject to natural disasters.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Natural hazard events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes, can claim irreplaceable lives and cause billions of dollars in damage to communities nationwide, with cascading impacts on the U.S. economy as well as the security and well-being of its citizenry. Unfortunately, these losses are only mounting. Reducing the toll of disasters depends critically upon engineers systematically documenting hazard impacts on the built environment and ensuring the resulting knowledge swiftly informs new regulatory policies and construction practices guiding more resilient recovery and rebuilding. This award will expand the role of the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network in these efforts to learn from natural disasters. This project will streamline the network’s core operations, supporting volunteer engineers as they collect and process valuable post-disaster data. In parallel, this project will develop new protocols for more efficient data collection and processing as well as knowledge dissemination to constituencies in research, policy, and practice. These protocols will broaden the participation of the research community, including undergraduate students, while building their capacity for high-quality forensic data. The research community will further benefit from the resulting Science Plan that ensures post-disaster observations inform future research and its translation into policy and practice. By more effectively utilizing the opportunity to not only learn but act upon the knowledge gained in the study of disasters, this project will help communities to become more resilient and sustainable. This project will contribute to the National Science Foundation (NSF) roles in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP).

This project will develop new protocols that enhance the StEER network’s efficiency, achieved through the outputs of six interconnected objectives, beginning with: (1) a tiered, regional data collection model for more agile field responses, (2) a workflow that unifies structural assessments across hazards and building typologies, (3) new capacities for automated data collection and synthesis, and (4) a damage quantification scheme offering more objective evaluations of performance compatible with established rating systems. Outputs of these four objectives will enhance the network’s core operations to lessen data collection/processing demands, increase efficiency, and reduce latency. This in turn will enable the network’s members to direct more energy toward in-depth forensic evaluations, feeding this learning into new dissemination conduits, formed through the addition of (5) a constituent-focused reconnaissance engagement and communications hub. This is coupled with (6) observation-driven science planning that links the network’s findings to research and technology transfer opportunities. In total, this will result in a more coherent natural hazards engineering research agenda and ultimately will help translate next-generation mitigation strategies into practice. Project data will be archived and made publicly available in the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Data Depot (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This project is funded through the NSF Directorate for Engineering Germination program, which seeks to foster the development of pedagogical approaches to increase the ability of academic researchers to formulate research questions and ideas with potentially transformative outcomes. The Immersive Training Studio for Technology-Environment-Energy-Water-Society (TEEWS) Grand Challenges aims to translate a successful entrepreneurial process for problem formulation and solution discovery to an academic setting. As part of an 8-week experience, 20 graduate fellows at the University of Notre Dame will be trained in transformative problem formulation, helping them expand their doctoral research to emphasize broader societal impacts. Through partnerships with nonprofit and community organizations, graduate fellows will be given the unique opportunity to directly contribute to solving community-sourced problems. By cultivating transferable and adaptable skills, graduate fellows will be empowered to focus their careers on broader-impacts-centered, transformative problem solving, with consequent societal benefits. Moreover, the focus on broader impacts-driven research may increase engagement and retention of women and other underrepresented groups in engineering. Successful implementation of this approach will lay the foundation for scaling this innovation ecosystem across disciplines (to science, public policy, economics, law, humanities), across learners (to undergraduates, post-docs, faculty, community partners), and across institutions.

Innovation ecosystems characterized by a social, open, contextualized, and tangible culture of learning have been used to inspire and create the conditions for innovation in entrepreneurial settings, but are not commonly used to provide a learning environment for embedding grounded problem formulation in doctoral research. The Immersive Training Studio for Technology-Environment-Energy-Water-Society (TEEWS) Grand Challenges will partner with INVANTI, a local startup incubator, to translate a successful entrepreneurial learning framework for problem formulation and solution discovery to an academic setting. Graduate fellows will use a facilitated process to engage with community partners to understand the problem, identify barriers, and formulate research questions. A new graduate seminar will provide training in systems engineering, community engagement, human-centered design, and convergence science to prepare fellows for the immersive summer experience. Project activities will include: (1) creating an innovation ecosystem for formulating transformative research questions, (2) developing and delivering a graduate transdisciplinary integration seminar, (3) leveraging and expanding a transdisciplinary research culture to recruit and mentor graduate fellows, (4) training approximately 20 fellows via an 8-week immersive studio experience, and (5) evaluating and refining the training program. The project’s theory of change is that by providing scaffolded training and experiential learning in an innovation ecosystem, encouraging mentorship from faculty, and offering cultural supports for ongoing exposure to a broad range of grounded, issue-based research, the program will train doctoral graduate students to formulate, critique, and refine transformative research questions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Despite significant technological advances in modeling and simulating natural hazard impacts on society, disaster resilience is, at its heart, a matter of human resilience. Thus, while engineers and social scientists have each made important strides in their respective fields, reducing the impacts of disasters on communities will ultimately require that researchers begin working across disciplines, not only within nations but across nations. Noting in particular the considerable investments made by the US and Japan to study and ultimately mitigate the impact of disasters in their respective countries, an important first step in fostering such cross-disciplinary and cross-national collaborations in disaster research can be achieved by bringing together the research communities cultivated by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and US National Science Foundation (NSF). In response, the US-Japan Workshop on Needs, Priorities and Partnerships to Advance Human-Centered Data for Resilience will virtually convene these communities over multiple days with the primary goal of identifying opportunities where US-Japan collaborations can uniquely advance a more human-centered approach to research on disaster resilience. A series of one-page briefings will be developed based on workshop learnings (published in English and Japanese) to offer a concise roadmap for possible future joint JST and NSF research opportunities. Ultimately, this roadmap and the interactions between participants will drive new lines of research and collaboration intended to reduce the risk of future disasters in both the US and Japan.<br/><br/>This interdisciplinary workshop is intentionally designed to incubate future US-Japanese collaborations by exploring important questions such as: (1) How can the human dimensions of disaster impacts be more accurately captured and represented in the analysis, modeling and simulation of disasters?, (2) What type of data and supporting research infrastructure would be necessary to enable novel, transdisciplinary approaches to answering these and other human-centered disaster questions?, and (3) In what ways can US-Japan collaborations advance these questions in new and important ways? The online activities strategically blend asynchronous and synchronous convening mechanisms to navigate time zone differences, accommodating different communication/problem solving styles and levels of language proficiency by providing multiple mechanisms to engage during real-time discussions. The hybrid model further uses Position Papers, submitted in advance, to pre-populate workshop discussions and offer those who come forward with bold ideas a larger platform for sharing their ideas through plenary-style Lightning Talks and Rapid Panels. The workshop’s live sessions will use interactive Miro boards in breakout room discussions to systematically establish the important link between compelling research questions/opportunities and underlying research infrastructure/data needs, subsequently mapping strengths, assets and opportunities for novel US-Japanese partnerships in response to these needs. The hybrid approach of preparatory asynchronous activities and well-structured synchronous activities increases the likelihood of discovering concrete recommendations for future collaborative efforts between the two countries.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.