NYU Tandon researchers awarded $1 Million in NSF grants for pioneering studies on disaster resilience and climate adaptation

Researchers from NYU Tandon have been awarded two grants totaling $1 million as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment program. This program fosters research that builds a deeper understanding of human behaviors at the interface of engineering and society, informing how communities manage risk and adapt to changing climate patterns, extreme weather, and other harmful impacts.

“Fostering Collective Disaster Resilience via Cross-city Learning of Post-disaster Mobility Dynamics and Collaborative Data Governance” will investigate how advanced computational methods and innovative data utilization can enhance disaster preparedness and response. The research team includes Stefaan Verhulst, research professor at the Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) and co-founder of The GovLab at NYU Tandon; Takahiro Yabe, assistant professor at CUSP and the Department of Technology Management and Innovation (TMI) at NYU Tandon; and Alex Pentland, professor at MIT. 

"CLIMA/Collaborative Research: Riders on the Storm: Climate Adaptation of Housing Infrastructure for Resilient Communities in Coastal Cities” will advance research on the adaptation of housing infrastructure in coastal communities vulnerable to natural hazards in a changing climate. The research team includes Luis Ceferino, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, affiliated faculty member at CUSP, and visiting research professor in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU Tandon; Maurizio Porfiri, director of CUSP and institute professor of Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU Tandon; and Cristina-Ioana Dragomir, clinical associate professor at CUSP and NYU Liberal Studies.

Advancing disaster resilience and introducing a data commons platform 

Research under the "Fostering Collective Disaster Resilience via Cross-city Learning of Post-disaster Mobility Dynamics and Collaborative Data Governance” project led by Verhulst, Yabe, and Pentland will address how challenges from rapidly accelerating climate change and more frequent large-scale urban disasters are compounded by insufficient data on large-scale disasters. The lack of data hinders the development and impact of urban simulation models that forecast short- and long-term socio-economic effects. Furthermore, privacy restrictions on human behavior data make it difficult to access, share, or reuse. To tackle these issues, the project will develop foundational computational methods using advanced language models to improve forecasting impacts, enhancing disaster preparedness and response strategies.

"Our work at The GovLab on data collaboratives has pioneered the way for innovative approaches to public-private data exchange. Now, we are dedicated to establishing frameworks that ensure these practices are not only sustainable but also systematic and responsible, ensuring long-term benefits for all stakeholders," said Verhulst.

By analyzing mobility data from over 150 disaster events in the US, the research aims to uncover both common trends and unique patterns. It also aims to highlight the importance of exploring innovative data sources to improve disaster resilience and climate change adaptation. The creation of a central data hub is a key component of the research.

"The Data Commons Platform is a cornerstone of our project, designed to democratize access to synthetic human behavior data under various disaster scenarios," said Yabe. “By ensuring inclusive and transparent data re-usage, the platform fosters collaboration among policymakers, researchers, and citizen groups. It supports convergent activities across disciplines such as urban science, infrastructure engineering, economics, public health, and social sciences, thereby enhancing our collective ability to respond to and mitigate disaster impacts.”

The project's policy relevance lies in its potential to transform disaster preparedness and response strategies through informed, data-driven decision-making, leveraging non-traditional data sources. The public-facing platform will also enable stakeholders to test various mitigation approaches, promoting a culture of proactive planning and actions.

Improving coastal resilience through innovative housing infrastructure solutions and climate adaptation strategies

The "CLIMA/Collaborative Research: Riders on the Storm: Climate Adaptation of Housing Infrastructure for Resilient Communities in Coastal Cities" project led by Ceferino, Porfiri, and Dragomir will develop a new mathematical framework to explore interactions between collective human behavior, built environments, and natural hazards that can speed up home retrofits and repairs or lead to an increase in out-migration following a disaster. 

“The project brings together qualitative and quantitative methods across engineering and social sciences to help improve the resilience of our cities to climate change,” said Porfiri. “While we focus on coastal cities and hazards in the state of New York, our insights could extend to other cities and hazards in the U.S. or elsewhere.”

The research employs methods from civil engineering, urban and network science, and social science to develop a scalable, interpretable mathematical framework. It uses a network perspective to study human-infrastructure interactions and improve understanding of collective human behavior in climate adaptation. The project focuses on three main areas: 

• developing a probabilistic dynamic model for single-household actions, including structural and non-structural interventions, that builds on fieldwork and migration theory; 
• analyzing emergent collective behavior using statistically principled approaches, field research, and refined and extended disaster datasets; and
• extending the probabilistic formulation from single-household to community adaptability for better estimates of community resilience to coastal hazards. 

Through these efforts, the research aims to turn sociotechnical insights into actionable and scalable methods that identify pathways for communities to adapt to climate change.