The Global Resilience Institute (GRI) at Northeastern University is excited to announce the funding of 11 interdisciplinary resilience research projects tackling a wide array of critical resilience issues. GRI is funding these cross-college research teams for 1-2 years.

The funded teams are engaging in a unique interdisciplinary effort involving an array of resilience-related topics. These include healthy aging, terrorism, critical infrastructure, use of remote systems for post-disaster damage assessments, community and urban resilience, sanctuary cities, energy system resilience, women’s networks in social crisis, coastal adaptation, and resilience modeling tools.

Each collaboration involves faculty members from two or more Northeastern colleges. An initial gathering of one of the funded projects, the Northeastern Collaborative on Resilient Energy (N-CORE), was attended by 15 Northeastern faculty members from a wide range of backgrounds including civil engineering, architecture, law, policy, computer science, communication, criminal justice, chemistry, and chemical engineering.

Northeastern Collaborative on Resilient Energy meeting
An initial gathering of the Northeastern Collaborative on Resilient Energy (N-CORE), was attended by NU faculty from a wide range of backgrounds.

A diverse group of proposals were submitted in April and the selected teams were notified in May.

GRI’s funded initiatives involve the following colleges across campus: College of Engineering, College of Social Science and Humanities; College of Science; College of Computer and Information Science; College of Arts, Media and Design; Bouvé College of Health Sciences; School of Law; and D’Amore-McKim School of Business. Two projects also include researchers from the Network Science Institute, and The George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security.

The GRI senior leadership team will work with the research project awardees to help position them to successfully compete for major interdisciplinary external grant funding. This includes identifying follow-on sponsors for the research as well as identifying external research collaborators, and providing support for drafting grant proposals throughout the life of the projects.

The 2017 GRI seed grant awardees are:

  1. A “network of networks” approach to multiscale dependence in critical infrastructure lifelines under resilience stressors | Devesh Tiwari (COE); Auroop Ganguly (COE); Ravi Sundaram (CCIS)
  2. Automated Assessment of Damaged Environments due to Extreme Events using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles | Jerome Hajjar (COE); Taskin Padir (COE); Peter Boynton (KRI)
  3. Bridging the Gap: A Proposal for a Framework to integrate Individual and Community Resilience to Violence | Daniel Aldrich (CSSH); Christie Rizzo (COS)
  4. Measuring Resilience for Coastal Adaptation | Laura Kuhl (CSSH); Steven Scyphers (COS)
  5. Modeling Tools for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency | Ozlem Ergun (COE); Tina Eliassi-Rad (CCIS)
  6. Northeastern Collaborative on Resilient Energy (N-CORE) | Jennie Stephens (CSSH); Sanjeev Mukerjee (COS); Ryan Ellis (CAMD); Edmund Yeh (COE); Michael Kane (COE); Ali Abur (COE)
  7. Safe Places and Politics of Fear: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of ‘Sanctuary Cities’ | Berna Turam (CSSH); Martha Davis (SoL); Alisa Lincoln (CSSH); Serena Parekh (CSSH); Amy Farrell (CSSH); Carlos Cuevas (CSSH)
  8. Science for Longevity: Developing Resilience to Aging by Curing Arthritis | Ambika Bajpayee (COE); Justin Crane (COS)
  9. Terrorism and International Business: Building Financial Resilience | Luis Dau (DMSB); Max Abrahms (CSSH)
  10. Urban Geosocial Network Resilience | Qi (Ryan) Wang (COE); Jianxi Gao (Network Science)
  11. Women and Resilience in Moments of Social Crisis: A Feminist Perspective | Brooke Foucault Welles (CAMD); Jennie Stephens (CSSH); Suzanna Walters (CSSH)

In making these awards, GRI’s Founding Director, Professor Stephen Flynn noted, “These projects represent something truly unique: research contributions from the entire Northeastern University community! These cross-college projects demonstrate the enthusiasm of faculty members to engage in the kind of interdisciplinary cooperation and collaboration that is indispensable to meeting the urgent resilience challenges of our turbulent times.”

Professor Jennie Stephens, GRI’s Associate Director for Strategic Research Collaborations, comments that “the broad range of interdisciplinary resilience work represented in these projects demonstrates Northeastern’s commitment to innovative, impactful research on critical issues facing society. We look forward to working with these researchers as they advance these exciting, collaborative projects.”

###

About the GRI:
The Global Resilience Institute (globalresilience.northeastern.edu) is leading a university-wide interdisciplinary effort to advance resilience-related initiatives that contribute to the security, sustainability, health and well-being of societies. Our objective is to help advance preparedness at multiple levels to effectively respond to slowly emerging disruptions and sudden disasters, both human-made and naturally-occurring. To learn more about the seed-funding program, click here.

Media Contact:
Christine Boynton
Communications & Media Manager
c.boynton@neu.edu