David Yu, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, has received an Early CAREER Development Award of $546,668 from the National Science Foundation to fund research into the enormous complexity associated with how the connections among flood disturbances, flood protection infrastructure designs, decisions of diverse actors, forms of information transmission, and underlying social attributes interweave to shape people's awareness of flood risks and community resilience.

The 5-year project, “CAREER: Evolution of Collective Disaster Memory: A Dynamic Behavioral and Systems Analysis toward Community Resilience (NSF Award# 2146483),” will seek to uncover answers to this puzzle and provide novel opportunities for communities to develop policies, infrastructure planning decisions, and engineering education programs in ways that prolong people’s flood awareness, thereby building community resilience. The project will apply a multi-method approach comprised of systems modeling, case study analyses, and controlled behavioral experiment to develop understanding. Dr. Yu will serve as the sole PI on the project.