Two NYU Wagner Professors to Explore Disaster Resiliency and Critical Infrastructures under NSF Grant

A team of researchers that includes NYU Wagner professors Rae Zimmerman and Zhan Guo as well as experts from NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for a project on disaster resiliency planning and design.

The multi-discipline project, “A Meta-Network System Framework for Resilient Analysis and Design of Modern Interdependent Critical Infrastructures," will create a framework to serve as the basis of future computing for a multi-infrastructure modeling, design, and simulation platform. The team will be led by Quanyan Zhu of NYU Polytechnic.

The grant is a Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Processes and Systems (RIPS) award, and one of a group of 10 new NSF-funded projects on disaster vulnerability, risk, and resiliency. These projects will be carried out over the next three years by more than 50 researchers from 16 institutions.

“RIPS researchers will explore the interactions between natural gas and electricity systems, power and communication networks, healthcare and cyber infrastructure and a variety of other combinations,” reads the NSF announcement. “Importantly, new understanding and models of resilience from these projects will encompass community participation, societal services, human activity and land-use. The researchers will also investigate questions related to vulnerability, risk and resilience in the face of various hazards as well as the everyday degradation that infrastructures face.”