Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning

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News & Updates

April 27, 2023 - Webinar: IN-CORE: Next-Gen Solutions for Resilience-Informed Community Decisions
Presentations from the Center of Excellence Team followed by on-line chat Q & A

Learn more about comprehensive decision support for communities at risk to natural hazards such as earthquakes, flooding, and climate change! The NIST funded Community Resilience Center will provide an overview of the science and technology used to develop the Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE), as well as examples of community models and outcomes.

Click here to watch the video
Congratulations to Himadri Sen Gupta (2023)
Himadr Sen Gupta is a PhD Candidate at University of Oklahoma.
He has been honored with the prestigious Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award by the Graduate Student Senate of the University of Oklahoma and furthermore, he received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the University of Oklahoma.
Congratulations to Andres Gonzalez
Dr Gonzalez is a distinguished academic and professional in the field of industrial and systems engineering.
Throughout his career, Dr. González has received several awards and honors, including the 2023 Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year award from The University of Oklahoma’s Latinx Coalition, the Dissertation Excellence Award for his Ph.D. students, and the Best Paper Award for his work “Interdependent Network Recovery Games” in Risk Analysis.
Congratulations to Jamie Padgett
Leading structural engineer Jamie Padgett, Ph.D., Stanley C. Moore Professor, Rice University, is the recipient of the 2023 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering from TAMEST. She was chosen for her life-saving research in infrastructure sustainability and resiliency in hazard-prone regions.
Dr. Padgett’s research enhances public safety and provides new methods for multi-hazard resilience modeling. Instead of looking at a single threat, like how a bridge will perform in an earthquake, her research looks at multiple hazards or multiple threats that a system might be exposed to over time.

Click here to watch the video
November 17-88, 2022- NIST Community Resilience Center of Excellence - November All-Center Meeting
The Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning held its Semi-annual Meeting November 17-18 in Herndon, VA. We kicked off the meeting with progress updates for the Center; Business development updates and POSE award. The first day also consisted of NIST Project updates, Presentations of Testbed updates and Recovery modeling.

Friday's agenda consisted of Lumberton Field Study and Testbed, Technical Brief Verification and Community Engagement.
April 28, 2022 - Webinar: Making an Impact with IN-CORE
Presentations from the Center of Excellence Team followed by on-line chat Q & A

The Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning has released v3.1.0 of the Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE) which is free to all and allows users to set up models of communities and explore physical, social, and economic dimensions of resilience and their interaction. This webinar will provide a short demo of IN-CORE, followed by a review of the science for three Center testbeds including Galveston, TX; Seaside, OR; and Lumberton, NC. The presenters will explain functionality, metrics and optimization within IN-CORE, as well as community partnerships recently formed to make an impact and take science to action. The webinar will close with a snapshot of the upcoming IN-CORE release, how to use INCORE, a user Slack invite, and how to join a user group, as well coordinated for the IN-CORE YouTube Channel and tutorials.

Click here to watch the video
Therese McAllister has been elected to Distinguished Membership in ASCE!
Please join in congratulating Therese McAllister who was elected to Distinguished Membership at the March Board of Direction Meeting. Distinguished Membership is the highest honor ASCE can bestow.

The formal induction ceremony is scheduled during the Annual Convention in Anaheim, CA during the Celebration of Leaders Luncheon on Monday, October 24 from 11:45 am – 1:45 pm.
Congratulations to Maria Koliou
Congratulations to Maria Koliou on her receipt of an NSF CAREER award entitled "An Integrated Experimental and Numerical Vulnerability Assessment of Aging Housing Infrastructure and Communities”
Jamie Padgett named CEE department chair, effective July 1, 2022
Jamie Padgett, Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering, will become chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Rice, effective July 1, 2022.

Click here to read more
NASEM Selects Hussam Mahmoud for the 2021-23 New Voices Cohort
The New Voices in Science, Engineering and Medicine Program announces its 2021-2023 cohort of 22 early-career leaders from academia, industry, government, and non-profit organizations. The new members are rising stars in their fields and have been selected through a competitive review process out of nearly 300 applicants.

Click here to read more
Professor Sutley Named Engineering Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (AD-DEIB).
Please join me in congratulating Associate Professor of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering Elaina Sutley for her selection to the role of Engineering Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (AD-DEIB).

KU Engineering has a strong tradition of support for underrepresented students, and are thrilled to have Professor Sutley guide this program going forward. Beyond her notable research success and outstanding teaching performance, she is an empathetic and thoughtful leader who will work to ensure students have every opportunity to succeed. Sutley joined KU in 2015 and conducts research on structures with an emphasis on disaster resilience and recovery.
Congratulations to Glenn Bell
ASCE announced its newly elected Distinguished Members today, and NIST Center EAP member, Glenn Bell, is among those honored. Election to Distinguished Membership is the highest honor that ASCE can bestow. A Distinguished Member is a person who has attained eminence in some branch of engineering or in the arts and sciences related thereto, including the fields of engineering education and construction. The total number of Distinguished Members elected in any year cannot exceed one for every 7,500 members. Please join me in congratulating Glenn for this significant professional recognition. Best, Bruce Ellingwood

Click here to read more
Therese McAllister (NIST) to receive the 2021 Walter P. Moore, Jr. Award in recognition of her technical expertise in and dedication to the development of structural codes and standards
You are to be commended for being a sterling example of a professional structural engineer in the Federal service who works tirelessly to advance the practice of structural engineering for the betterment of society. You have generously given your time and talents to ASCE, playing key leadership roles in standards activities affecting the practice of structural engineering through ASCE 7, performance-based design, and representation to the International Code Council. Terri will receive her award at the SEI/ASCE Structures Congress 2022 in Atlanta next April. Please join me in offering congratulations to Terri on this significant honor. Warmly, Bruce Ellingwood
April 22, 2021 - Webinar: Using IN-CORE to study and measure community resilience
Presentations from the Center of Excellence Team followed by on-line chat Q & A

The Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning has released v2.0 of the Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE) which is free to all and allows users to set up models of communities and explore physical, social, and economic dimensions of resilience and their interaction. This webinar will provide an overview of IN-CORE, information on how to access/use IN-CORE, and several examples. Specifically, the webinar will begin with a very short overview of the NIST Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Planning. The science behind each of three testbeds recently released as part of the Center's IN-CORE will be presented; followed by the IN-CORE example for that testbed. We’ll explore tornadoes, tsunamis/earthquakes, and hurricanes in the examples.

Click here to watch the video
March 19, 2021 - Identifying Data Guideline Needs for Community and Regional Resilience Modeling Workshop
Click here to read more
Congratulations to Paolo Gardoni!
He recieved a named appointment at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Click here to read more
April 30 2020 - Webinar: Moving IN-CORE from Research to Practice
Presentations from the Center of Excellence Team followed by on-line chat Q & A

Learn more about the NIST-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning and how the Center's research is progressing to models of community recovery and to field studies.

Watch the video here

Passcode: Xzxhfay6
February 3, 2020 - NIST Renews $20M Award to Community Resilience Center of Excellence
CSU News Release
NIST News Release
November 6-8, 2019 - NIST Community Resilience Center of Excellence - November All-Center Meeting
The Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning held its Semi-annual Meeting November 7-8 in Rockville, MD. We kicked off the meeting with a NCSA Hackathon Meeting which consisted of developers offering hands on training to those who needed to install pyIncore, run pyIncore examples and answer all coding questions.

Thursday's agenda consisted of Reviewing IN-CORE, University accomplishments and plans for years 6-10, NIST research projects and collaboration and Year 6 collaboration goals with the CoE and NIST. Friday's agenda line up consisted of moving the CoE forward with renewal proposal discussions and beyond IN-CORE with business plan. We wrapped up the meeting on Friday with presentations on Lumberton Field Study
May 1-3, 2019 - NIST Community Resilience Center of Excellence - May All-Center Meeting
The Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning held its Semi-annual Meeting May 1 – 3, 2019 in Fort Collins, CO. We kicked off the meeting with a live Webinar entitled “The Structure of IN-CORE for Risk-Informed Decision Making”.

Wednesday afternoon contained presentations and discussions on the renewal proposal. We wrapped up Wednesday evening with a poster session at the Rio Agave in downtown Fort Collins. Thursday's line up consisted of Galveston Testbed presentations, CoE Strategy and Consensus Building, and IN-CORE 2.0: Getting ready for the 2019 public open-source release. We wrapped up the meeting on Friday with presentations on Lumberton Field Study: Integrating Policy, Data, and IN-CORE models as well as discussing the next steps for year 5.
February 7, 2019 - Congratulations to Elaina Sutley - NSF CAREER Award
Dear NIST CoE Community,

Please join me in congratulating Elaina Sutley on her NSF CAREER award entitled "CAREER: Assessing the Role of Buildings and Organizations in Community Disaster Resilience". The link to the abstract is below. Nice work Elaina !!!

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1847373&HistoricalAwards=false
September 12, 2018 As Hurricane Florence Approached, Researchers Watched This Town Far from the Coast
Click here to learn more
October 31- November 2, 2018 - NIST Community Resilience Center of Excellence - November All-Center Meeting
We had a very rigorous agenda at our meeting in Gaithersburg, MD with lots of material being covered. We kicked off the meeting on October 31st with presentations on the Center’s research progress and mid- afternoon, we spent the remaining time on renewal proposal presentations. Thursday brought many presentations on the structure of the Computational Environment IN-CORE: Present and Future which consisted of discussions on hazard modeling, damage and functionality, direct and indirect economic and social losses, as well as understanding interfaces and data procedures in IN-CORE. Researchers discussed policies, decision levers, hurricane studies, the resilience glossary and much more. Friday led to further researcher discussions on testbeds and field studies. Two field study breakouts also took place on Friday afternoon.

On the evening of November 1st, Lori Peek, the director of the Natural Hazards Center at CU Boulder and CoE Researcher, gave an evening presentation entitled “On Infrastructure: Seeing it, Building It and Strengthening It”. In this talk Lori shared three stories, about three projects, that have transformed her thinking regarding the importance of and connections between physical and social infrastructure. Each of these projects involved interdisciplinary collaborations between social scientists and engineers that ultimately led to breakthroughs that would not have been possible in a space of disciplinary isolation. Lori argued that in an ever more turbulent world, it is all the more necessary that we engage with one another, respect and learn from each other, and move forward together to try to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
The Lumberton, North Carolina Flood of 2016: A Community Resilience Focused Technical Investigation
Click here to read more
May 2018 - Webinar: Documenting and Modeling Community Recovery
Presentations from the Center of Excellence Team followed by on-line chat Q & A

Learn more about the NIST-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning and how the Center's research is progressing to models of community recovery and to field studies.

Watch the video here
2017 - Ellingwood receives ASCE's Ang Award
Professor Bruce R. Ellingwood, Center Co-Director, is to be awarded the 2017 Alfredo Ang Award on Risk Analysis and Management of Civil Infrastructure "for significant advancement of and outstanding contributions in the field of probabilistic risk analysis and management of civil infrastructure, notably in performance-based design, structural safety, reliability, and resilience in relation to abnormal loads and progressive collapse."

The award was given at the 2018 SEI/ASCE Structures Congress in Dallas-Fort Worth.
2017
SUNY Board Names Havidán Rodríguez 20th President of the University at Albany Rodríguez, comes to UAlbany with 25 years of experience as a leader in higher education. He was the founding provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) and a respected scholar who studies the socio-economic impacts of disasters and the economic well-being of minority populations in the United States and Puerto Rico. He is also a strong advocate for involving undergraduates in research.

To read more about this outstanding news: http://www.albany.edu/news/79681.php
April 27, 2017 - Community Resilience: Modeling, Field Studies and Implementation Webinar
Thursday, April 27, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM (MDT)
Learn more about the NIST-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning and how the Center is developing a computational environment to help define the attributes that make communities resilient.
Join this informational Webinar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyjzCDxcdSA&feature=youtu.be to learn more about the Center's recent activities.
March 2017 - Upgrading our infrastructure: Targeting repairs for locks, dams and bridges, by Hussam N. Mahmoud.
December 2016 - Lumberton, NC Flood is Center's first field study - team of researchers will study Lumberton recovery over the next few years. To Read More, click here.
November 3-4, 2016 - NIST Community Resilience Center of Excellence - November All-Center Meeting
We had another very successful meeting in Gaithersburg, MD with lots of material that was covered. In addition to the general meeting, several task committees held meetings. Researchers discussed housing and flood loss recoveries, building and building inventory functionality, interdependencies on integration of link damages into the unified lifeline operation model, potable water networks and centerville communications model, electric power dependencies, fragility modeling of bridges, roadway networks, economic analysis, IN CORE updates as well as flood disasters and much more.

On the evening of November 3rd, Glenn Bell, a member of our EAP, and Chief Executive Officer of Simpson, Gumpertz and Heger Engineers, gave an after-dinner presentation on his vision of how engineering education and professional training will need to evolve over the next two decades in order for the profession to remain competitive and be able to attract highly motivated and qualified young engineers. Glenn emphasized the need to not only maintain technical excellence but also to develop an enhanced sensitivity to human needs in the built environment, brought about by liberal education and international experiences. To a Center audience consisting of a mix of engineers, social scientists and economists, Glenn's remarks resonated with the objectives and aspirations of the Center.
November 2016 - Call for Papers for National Science Foundation-funded workshop series on Methods of Disaster Research: Interdisciplinary Approaches. To Learn More, click here.
September 2016 - Co-Director of the Center, Bruce Ellingwood, has been named one of the 2017 recipients of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Outstanding Projects and Leaders (OPAL) Awards. According to ASCE, "the awards are given to model civil engineers who have demonstrated outstanding lifetime achievement, leadership and a long-term commitment to excellence." In March, Ellingwood will be honored at the Opal Gala in Arlington, Virginia for his "demonstrated excellence in furthering civil engineering education." Earlier this year, Ellingwood received the 2016 Alfred M. Freudenthal Medal, also from ASCE, "for the unique role he has played in transforming structural reliability from an academic research specialty into the mainstream of structural engineering practice."
The OPAL Award and Freudenthal Medal recognize Ellingwood's contributions to the field of civil engineering education and research, and he is grateful for the recognition: "It's a recognition from my peers that my teaching has had a long-lasting impact on the profession, and a positive impact on the lives of many people. I was delighted and honored to be selected."
June 2016 - Featured Research for the month of June is New and Updated Analyses in IN-CORE v1.0, submitted by the Center's Team from NCSA: Danny Powell, Jong Lee, Chris Navarro, Nathan Tolbert, Omar Elabd, Yong Wook Kim Read all about it on our Featured Research page.
May 12-14, 2016 - The Sixth US-Japan Wind Engineering Workshop on Wind Engineering was held on the University of Tokyo Campus May 12-14.
The meeting was organized by Professor Partha Sakar from Iowa State University. US-Japan research collaboration for the next 4 years was discussed. Meeting attendees included Center Co-Director John van de Lindt (CSU), Center researchers Suren Chen (CSU) and Dorothy Reed (UW). Photos here.
May 2016 - CoE Researcher Dr. Lori Peek co-authored the book Children of Katrina, which was published last year and details a seven-year study of how young people fare after disaster. The book has been named a Colorado Book Awards finalist.
April 28, 2016 - The Center held it's first student and post-doc poster session during the semi-annual meeting last week.
From the sixteen submissions, our panel of 6 judges awarded First Place to Hana Chmielewski (NIST Intern), Second Place to Stephanie Pilkington (CSU), and Honorable Mention to Akshat Chulahwat (CSU).
April 27-28 - Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning held Semi-Annual Meeting in Fort Collins, CO.
More than 90 people were in attendance, including many university faculty, researcher, post-docs and students, collaborators from NIST, as well as the Center's External Assessment Panel. During the meeting, the Center presented a live webinar via YouTube to offer the public more information about the NIST-funded Center, how the Center is developing a computational environment to help define the attributes that make communities resilient, recent accomplishments and the current path forward.

A recording of the Webinar can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/eyjzCDxcdSA

Watch the story on SOURCE.
April 15, 2016 - April's Featured Task is from the Social Science Team: Characterizing Community.
Consider for a moment your community, whether it is a relatively small, rural town or a very large, complex urban metropolitan area. Our communities are comprised of a network of social systems... To Read More, click here.
April 14, 2016 - We are very excited to relay the news that a member of the Resilience Center's External Assessment Panel, Dr. Havidán Rodríguez, has been selected as the 2016 recipient of the Cesar Estrada Chavez Award from the American Association for Access, Equity, and Diversity (www.aaaed.org)! This Award, which will be conferred in June in Washington, DC, during AAAED's 42nd National Conference and Annual Meeting, "recognizes an individual who has demonstrated leadership in support of workers' rights and humanitarian issues".
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Rodriguez on this great honor!
April 2, 2016 - NIST PI's Walter Peacock and Shannon VanZandt presented on "Best Practices in Disaster Recovery Planning" at the American Planning Association (APA) National Planning Conference at on April 2, 2016 in Phoenix, AZ. Their presentation stressed the challenges that arise in pre-disaster versus post-disaster recovery planning and the importance of having a proactive, integrated, and deliberative planning process.
For more information about the APA and the HMDR visit: https://www.planning.org/divisions/hazardmitigation/
March 10-11, 2016 - Climate Change and Its Impact: Risks and Inequalities, March 10-11, Champaign, IL
Keynote speaker was Ms. Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and current UN Special Envoy for Climate Change.

Workshop goal was to develop a better understanding of the ways that climate change is affecting society by altering weather patterns, modifying the likelihoods and magnitudes of natural hazards, and exacerbating inequalities as well as creating new inequalities among individuals around the world. Learn more at the website: http://mae.cee.illinois.edu/ClimateChange/
March 7, 2016 - Please join the Resilience Center in congratulating Bruce Ellingwood who has just received from the Engineering Mechanics Institute of ASCE the prestigious 2016 Alfred M. Freudenthal Medal, "For the unique role that he has played in introducing concepts of probability, statistics and structural reliability to structural engineering and for transforming structural reliability from academic research specialty into a mainstream of structural engineering practice."
Congratulations Bruce!

To learn more about the award and see a list of past award recipients, visit the ASCE website page.
December 9, 2015 - We are proud to report Center Co-Director Bruce Ellingwood gave a a Keynote Lecture in December at the Second International Conference on Performance-based and Life-cycle Structural Engineering (PLSE 2015) in Brisbane, Australia.

Dr. Ellingwood's keynote lecture title was Performance-Based Engineering for Multiple Hazards: The Role of Structural Reliability and Risk Assessment. It can be found in the PLSE Conference Proceedings here

PLSE Conference website
November 5-6 - NIST Community Resilience Center of Excellence - November All-Center Meeting:
Thank you for an excellent meeting! We covered quite a bit of material, it was an exciting 2 days. The presentations were fantastic and all of the hard work was apparent! Thanks to everyone who attended in person and via webex!
October 27, 2015 - Center Co-Director John van de Lindt will be speaking Tuesday, October 27 at the Asian Pacific Homeland Security 2015 Event in Singapore.
His keynote title is "The Science Behind Modeling Community Disaster Resilience."

Conference website: http://www.aphs15.com/
October 2015 - Congratulations to Center Researcher Charles Nicholson of OU who was awarded a NSF-funded CRISP (Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes) grant.
To Read More, click here.
October 2015 - ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering intends to publish a Special Issue dedicated to fields of assessment, design, and mitigation of multiple hazards for structural and infrastructure systems, "Recent Advances in Assessment and Mitigation of Multiple Hazards for Structures and Infrastructures." Center of Excellence Researcher Jamie E. Padgett (RICE) will serve as a guest editor on the issue. Submission deadline is October 31.
August 11, 2015 - Researcher and task lead for the Center, Dr. Hussam Mahmoud has been selected to participate in National Academy of Engineering symposium.
To Read More, click here.
July 29, 2015 - Lori Peek played a key role in a landmark national study issued this week on the lingering effects of Superstorm Sandy.
To Read More, click here.

And Lori has recently published a book about the children of Katrina. You can learn more about this here.
May 1, 2015 - Center Researchers gathered at NIST on May 1st, 2015 in Gaithersburg, Maryland for the Joint Center NIST Collaborator Kick Off Workshop
The discussion focused on developing synergies between Center led tasks and NIST research programs.