Planning: CRISES: Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Catastrophic Surprises

长期以来，公共和私营部门危机管理人员一直渴望了解即将发生的灾难性意外事件（如重大自然灾害、公共卫生危机或意外的军事或恐怖袭击）。这项计划奖助金旨在发展必要的基础科学，以了解、理论化和预先警告潜在的灾难性意外。它为确定和招募合作伙伴提供支持，以建立一个国家级中心的团队，该中心利用多个知识分支，为官员、政策制定者和公众（特别是那些在政治和经济上被边缘化的人）开发代表意外危险的新方法，其明确目标是确定更好地预测、避免或应对灾难性意外的方法。为了应对灾害，无论是否令人惊讶，都需要一种跨学科的方法，将自然和建筑环境如何与社会系统相互作用的知识整合在一起。通过这笔赠款，由社会、卫生和工程科学教师组成的核心规划团队将汇集他们在定量和定性方法、社区参与性研究、风险建模、现场流行病学、政策分析和绘图以及快速反应灾害研究方面的专业知识。他们将从学术、私人和公共部门的各个科学领域寻找并招募更多的合作伙伴，共同构思可能证明是灾难性的惊喜，并确定关键研究的应用领域。方法包括召开多次会议进行科学讨论和审议；使用新技术进行远程协作；以及提高创造力的方法，如在管理文献中发现的想法矩阵。这一规划拨款提出了需要的新方法，这是其他灾害相关中心无法集中解决的问题，它提供了一个跳板，超越了以前的努力，对意外事件产生了变革性的理解。这项资助的更广泛影响包括制定一项中心提案，撰写一篇文章，介绍计划小组对意外事件的最新科学思考，以及将计划阶段开发的智力资本整合到从事灾害管理领域工作的学生的课程中。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Understanding that a catastrophic surprising event (such as a major natural disaster, public health crisis, or unanticipated military or terrorist attack) is about to occur has long been an aspiration of public and private sector crisis managers. This planning grant seeks to develop the basic science needed to understand, theorize, and forewarn against potentially catastrophic surprises. It provides support to identify and recruit partners to establish a team for a national-level center that draws on multiple branches of knowledge to develop new ways of representing surprise dangers for officials, policymakers, and the public - especially those who are politically and economically marginalized - with the explicit goal of determining ways to better anticipate, avert, or contend with catastrophic surprise. To address hazards, whether surprising or not, requires an interdisciplinary approach that integrates knowledge of how the natural and built environments interact with social systems. Through this grant, the core planning team - comprised of faculty in the social, health, and engineering sciences - will bring together their expertise in quantitative and qualitative methods, community-based participatory research, risk modeling, field epidemiology, policy analyses and mapping, and quick response disaster research. They will identify and recruit additional partners across various scientific domains from the academic, private, and public sector to collaboratively conceptualize surprises that can prove catastrophic and identify application domains for critical investigation. Methods include numerous meetings for scientific discussion and deliberation; use of new technologies for remote collaboration; and creativity-enhancing approaches such as idea-matrices that have been identified in the management literatures. This planning grant surfaces new approaches that are needed, and for which no other disaster-related center cohesively addresses, providing a springboard to move beyond previous efforts to generate a transformative understanding of surprising events. The broader impacts of the grant include the development of a center proposal, an article that will present the planning group’s state-of-the-science thinking on surprises, and the integration of the intellectual capital developed during the planning stage into coursework for students pursuing work in the disaster management field.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.