Rice part of $20 million community resilience center

Research will help communities recover from extreme weather, other hazards

Rice University researcher Jamie Padgett will play a key role in a new $20 million Community Resilience Center of Excellence announced last week at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo.

The new center will help local governments decide how to best invest resources to withstand and recover from extreme weather events and other hazards to buildings and infrastructure. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is funding the center with a $20 million, five-year grant.

Jamie Padgett

The center’s multidisciplinary team includes experts in engineering, economics, social sciences, and data and computing from Colorado State, Rice, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Oregon State University, the University of Oklahoma, Texas A&M University, the University of Washington, the University of South Alabama, California Polytechnic University in Pomona and Texas A&M-Kingsville.

“I look forward to working with this large multi-institutional and multidisciplinary group to help tackle problems of community resilience in the face of hazards,” said Padgett, a co-principal investigator on the NIST grant and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice.

Work at the center will support NIST’s creation of its Disaster Resilience Framework. The framework will focus on buildings and infrastructure systems, such as power, communication, water and transportation. It also will address how to maintain social services, economic functions and vital community institutions like hospitals, schools, banks and social service entities.

“The center will focus on developing tools that individual communities can use to assess their resilience,” said center co-director John van de Lindt, Colorado State’s George T. Abell Distinguished Professor of Infrastructure, the principal investigator on the NIST grant.

The centerpiece of the center’s effort will be a computer model for community resilience. Built on an open-source platform, the model and associated software and databases will incorporate a risk-based approach to decision-making that will enable quantitative comparisons of different resilience strategies.

Padgett said, “As a part of this effort, I’ll serve as a liaison between the engineering team and NIST, and I will conduct research in the area of modeling infrastructure performance, such as different modes of transportation, that can be subjected to multiple hazards.”

As the computer model is developed, its performance will be tested against data gathered from past disasters. Ultimately, the model will be able to learn from one analysis to the next, a capability that does not exist in any other risk or disaster-resilience model in the world.