CAREER: Strengthening US Infrastructure and Communities through Science-Informed Disaster Policy and Engineering Civic Engagement

该奖项全部或部分根据2021年美国救援计划法案（公法117-2）资助。该教师早期职业发展（CAREER）项目的目标是从根本上推进对联邦灾害政策，地方抗灾行动和建筑环境风险的趋同性的理解，为研究人员，决策者和未来的从业者。这项工作将集中在联邦紧急事务管理局（FEMA）公共援助（PA）计划上，该计划是州和地方政府恢复受损基础设施的主要救灾来源。巴勒斯坦权力机构的结构可能引起道德风险，州和地方政府推迟维护，回避缓解，并允许在风险地区进行开发，所有这些都完全期望获得援助。另一方面，有传闻证据表明，驾驭这一系统是令人生畏的，资源较少的社区可能得到的援助较少。最后，关于公共行政如何影响当地基础设施决策、基础设施质量和社区成果的知识贫乏。这项工作将作为政策改革辩论的初步证据基础。这项工作的影响将在多个层面上扩大，包括通过精心设计的旨在共同产生知识的讲习班与政策制定者合作，并通过工程公民模块与未来的从业者合作，以便工程专业的学生能够认识到他们在创建有复原力的社区中的作用。公民教育提供了社会背景下，工程师将实践，并给他们的动力，以解决紧迫的社会问题，有关美国的基础设施。这个职业生涯项目将开发一个综合的多尺度框架，作为证据基础上的辩论灾害政策改革。新的方面的工作包括：（1）隔离的地方能力如何影响的水平，被授予的PA及其影响分配的公平性和当地的恢复途径，使用统计模型;（2）全面评估决策过程中的地方官员，以应对联邦灾害政策，使用效用理论和半结构化访谈;（3）将这些知识融入灵活的模拟模型，对政策改革进行事前测试。模型验证和知识共享将在旨在吸引政策制定者、研究人员和工程实践者的研讨会上进行。这项工作将作为一个范例，说明如何整合工程、数据科学和风险领域，为主动和气候准备的灾害政策提供信息，以及教育未来工程师了解联邦基础设施政策如何影响城市景观风险的重要性。因此，这个CAREER项目将在多个工程课程中纳入工程公民教育，包括一个新的数据科学课程“公民影响的数据分析”。该公民计划将每年进行外部评估，学生将受到纵向监测，以了解公民学习如何塑造工程专业学生对公民责任的看法，以及他们如何为紧迫的国家基础设施问题做出贡献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).The goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to fundamentally advance understanding of the convergent nature of federal disaster policy, local resilience actions, and risk in the built environment for researchers, decision-makers, and future practitioners. The work will focus on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Public Assistance (PA) program, which is the primary source of disaster relief for state and local governments to restore damaged infrastructure. The structure of PA could give rise to a moral hazard, whereby state and local governments defer maintenance, eschew mitigation, and permit development in risky places, all with a full expectation of receiving aid. On the flip side, there is anecdotal evidence that navigating this system is daunting and that communities with fewer resources may receive less aid. Ultimately, knowledge is poor on how PA influences local infrastructure decisions, infrastructure quality, and community outcomes. This work will serve as a preliminary evidentiary basis for debate on policy reform. The impact of the work will be expanded at multiple levels, including with policymakers through carefully constructed workshops designed to co-produce knowledge, and with future practitioners through engineering-civics modules so that engineering students can recognize their role in creating resilient communities. A civics education provides the societal context in which engineers will practice and gives them the impetus to address pressing societal questions related to America’s infrastructure.This CAREER project will develop an integrated multi-scale framework to serve as an evidentiary basis for debate on disaster policy reform. Novel aspects of the work include (1) isolating how local capacity influences the level of PA that is awarded and its repercussions on distributive equity and local recovery pathways using statistical models; (2) comprehensively evaluating decision-making processes by local officials in response to federal disaster policy using utility theory and semi-structured interviews; (3) integrating this knowledge into flexible simulation models to conduct ex-ante testing of policy reforms. Model validation and knowledge sharing will occur during workshops designed to engage policymakers, researchers, and engineering practitioners. This work will serve as an exemplar of how integrating engineering, data science, and risk domains can inform proactive and climate-ready disaster policy and also the importance of educating future engineers on how federal infrastructure policy influences risk in the urban landscape. As such, this CAREER project will incorporate an engineering-civics education across multiple engineering courses, including a new data science course “Data Analysis for Civic Impact.” The civics program will be externally evaluated yearly and students will be monitored longitudinally to understand how civic-learning shapes how engineering students think about their civic duty and how they can contribute to pressing national infrastructure questions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.