CAREER: Strengthening US Infrastructure and Communities through Science-Informed Disaster Policy and Engineering Civic Engagement

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

The goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to fundamentally advance understanding of the convergent nature of federal disaster policy, local resilience actions, and risk in the built environment for researchers, decision-makers, and future practitioners. The work will focus on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Public Assistance (PA) program, which is the primary source of disaster relief for state and local governments to restore damaged infrastructure.

The structure of PA could give rise to a moral hazard, whereby state and local governments defer maintenance, eschew mitigation, and permit development in risky places, all with a full expectation of receiving aid. On the flip side, there is anecdotal evidence that navigating this system is daunting and that communities with fewer resources may receive less aid.

Ultimately, knowledge is poor on how PA influences local infrastructure decisions, infrastructure quality, and community outcomes. This work will serve as a preliminary evidentiary basis for debate on policy reform. The impact of the work will be expanded at multiple levels, including with policymakers through carefully constructed workshops designed to co-produce knowledge, and with future practitioners through engineering-civics modules so that engineering students can recognize their role in creating resilient communities.

A civics education provides the societal context in which engineers will practice and gives them the impetus to address pressing societal questions related to America’s infrastructure.

This CAREER project will develop an integrated multi-scale framework to serve as an evidentiary basis for debate on disaster policy reform. Novel aspects of the work include (1) isolating how local capacity influences the level of PA that is awarded and its repercussions on distributive equity and local recovery pathways using statistical models; (2) comprehensively evaluating decision-making processes by local officials in response to federal disaster policy using utility theory and semi-structured interviews; (3) integrating this knowledge into flexible simulation models to conduct ex-ante testing of policy reforms.

Model validation and knowledge sharing will occur during workshops designed to engage policymakers, researchers, and engineering practitioners. This work will serve as an exemplar of how integrating engineering, data science, and risk domains can inform proactive and climate-ready disaster policy and also the importance of educating future engineers on how federal infrastructure policy influences risk in the urban landscape.

As such, this CAREER project will incorporate an engineering-civics education across multiple engineering courses, including a new data science course “Data Analysis for Civic Impact.” The civics program will be externally evaluated yearly and students will be monitored longitudinally to understand how civic-learning shapes how engineering students think about their civic duty and how they can contribute to pressing national infrastructure 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.