Welcome to the Sustainable and Resilient Systems Lab housed in the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University!

We think about communities as a series of systems (such as infrastructure, social networks, logistics, economies, governments etc.) and work to make them more sustainable and resilient to natural hazards and climate change. We make advances in the fields of risk and resilience analysis and use tools from operations research, statistics, computer science, and civil engineering to improve climate and hazard adaptation decision-making. Often, this looks like (1) using data science, NLP, and AI/ML to better-quantify how communities are impacted by climate change or extreme events and (2) building numerical simulations to test how decision-making (such as policy, aid interventions, infrastructure changes etc…) impact day-to-day life. We focus many of our efforts on how to shrink the climate gap by quantifying the disproportionate impact of natural hazards on historically-disadvantaged groups. Examples of the types of questions we think about are below:

  • Computational Resilience Methods: How do communities respond, adapt, and transform as a result of natural hazards and climate change?
  • Policy & Adaptation Simulation:  How do changes in the way we design operate and community systems impact their sustainability, resilience, and equitable distribution of services?

 

Our group is growing! If you are thinking about a Ph.D. in engineering with a focus on data science, simulation, and machine learning methods applied to problems quantifying and reducing the impact of climate change on communities (particularly vulnerable ones), please feel free to reach out. Similarly, if you are a current ISE doctoral student in the SAO area looking for a research advisor please send us an email!