Rachel Davidson

Donald C. Phillips Professor of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering

Hurricanes, earthquakes, and fires: An interdisciplinary, systems approach to understanding and managing disaster risk

Reception to follow in Du Pont Hall Lobby

Registration by March 31 is requested: https://forms.gle/Ujt35vh89eEMtYkk9

ABSTRACT

Natural disasters cut across every aspect of modern life. They cause injuries, deaths, and trauma; damage buildings; and disrupt transportation and utility services. They force people out of their homes and destroy businesses. Recovery takes years. Understanding and managing this risk is challenging. It requires addressing large uncertainties and numerous constituencies with multiple competing objectives. The problems are spatial and dynamic, and the technical aspects must be understood in the ever-changing environmental, social, economic, political, and cultural context in which they exist. In this talk, I’ll share three examples of long-running efforts to address key disaster challenges using a broadly interdisciplinary systems perspective: (1) managing hurricane evacuations; (2) minimizing the negative effects of utility service interruptions; and (3) supporting regional disaster risk management policy. We’ll discuss both causes for concern and reasons for optimism. 

BIOGRAPHY

Rachel Davidson is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the College of Engineering, the Donald C. Phillips Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a core faculty member in the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. She is also PI of the NSF-funded Coastal Hazards, Equity, Economic prosperity, and Resilience (CHEER) Hub and a member of the NHERI Computational Modeling and Simulation Center (SimCenter). She is a Fellow and Past-President of the Society for Risk Analysis, winner of the ASCE Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award (2019), member of the National Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction (ACEHR), and a fellow of the Executive Leadership in Academic Technology and Engineering (ELATE at Drexel) program (2015-2016).

Prior to joining UD in 2007, Davidson held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She was also Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University (2006-7), Visiting Professor and Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand (2013-14) and Shimizu Visiting Professor at Stanford University (2022). Davidson earned her B.S.E. from Princeton University and M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. She conducts research on natural disaster risk modeling and civil infrastructure systems