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

该奖项的全部或部分资金来自《2021年美国救援计划法案》(公法117-2)。该学院早期职业发展(CAREAR)项目的目标是从根本上促进研究人员、决策者和未来实践者对联邦灾难政策、地方复原力行动和建筑环境中风险的趋同性质的理解。这项工作将集中在联邦紧急事务管理局(FEMA)的公共援助(PA)计划，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。PA的结构可能会引发道德风险，州和地方政府推迟维护，避免缓解，并允许在有风险的地方进行开发，所有这些都是在完全期待得到援助的情况下进行的。另一方面，有坊间证据表明，驾驭这一体系令人望而生畏，资源较少的社区可能会得到更少的援助。归根结底，对于PA如何影响当地基础设施决策、基础设施质量和社区结果的知识匮乏。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，包括通过精心建造的研讨会与政策制定者合作，以共同产生知识，并通过工程-公民模块与未来的实践者合作，使工程学学生能够认识到他们在创建有弹性的社区方面的作用。公民教育提供了工程师实践的社会背景，并给了他们解决与美国基础设施相关的紧迫社会问题的动力。这一职业项目将发展一个综合的多尺度框架，作为关于灾害政策改革的辩论的证据基础。这项工作的新方面包括：(1)利用统计模型分离地方能力如何影响所授予的公共政策的水平及其对分配公平和地方恢复路径的影响；(2)利用效用理论和半结构访谈全面评估地方官员对联邦灾害政策的决策过程；(3)将这些知识整合到灵活的模拟模型中，以进行政策改革的事前测试。模型验证和知识共享将在旨在让政策制定者、研究人员和工程从业者参与的研讨会期间进行。这项工作将作为一个范例，说明将工程学、数据科学和风险领域整合在一起，如何为积极主动的气候准备灾害政策提供信息，以及教育未来工程师联邦基础设施政策如何影响城市景观中的风险的重要性。因此，这个职业项目将包括多个工程课程的工程-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”。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影响工程学学生对其公民责任的看法，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，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.