The Center has supported projects in 14 states and Puerto Rico since 2015.
Year 6 emphasizes transition of research
In our sixth year of funding from DHS, the CRC continues to focus on protecting communities from coastal hazards and transitioning its projects into products and services for end users.
The Center currently supports 16 core projects, 11 research and 5 education, as part of its Year 6 portfolio, which covers the period from July 1, 2020 through June 30, 2021. These ongoing projects focus on the transition of research outcomes, and the institutionalization of education programs based at CRC partner universities.
CRC’s projects are divided into four categories: Coastal Infrastructure Resilience, Building Resilient Communities, Coastal Hazards Modeling and Education & Workforce Development. Learn more about the current slate of projects here and view our updated partners map here.
A team of University of West Florida students, led by Dr. Kwame Owusu-Daaku (blue shirt, center), worked on a housing study for the Calhoun County, Fla., government following Hurricane Michael (2018).
Hurricane Michael is model for future university/community collaboration
In October 2018, Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida Panhandle as a Category 5 storm, arriving with peak winds of 155 miles per hour and leaving in its wake more than $25 billion in damages. The most impacted communities, many of them rural and with local governments administratively under-staffed relative to the rebuilding task before them, were in critical need of resources to begin the long road to recovery. Many towns and counties that were forced to rebuild from the ground up.
Representatives from FEMA’s National Disaster Recovery Support (NDRS) cadre coordinated a federal response that included partnering with college and university faculty and students to provide technical planning expertise - a model CRC has also used for recovery from Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Over the next few weeks we are sharing a story about how the ongoing work of connecting and coordinating institutions of higher education with under-resourced communities and local governments can improve long-term recovery outcomes.
Read Part 1 here, and look for the rest of the story in our next newsletter.
CRC in the news
CRC research has appeared in media coverage in the last few weeks, including stories on our work protecting critical infrastructure in the Northeast, the ADCIRC Prediction System™ technology and the current hurricane season.
In October, CRC partners at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez held three webinars about resilience of coastal infrastructure on the island as part of an education project that expands the “traditional” classroom into seminars for the greater community. Speakers included UPRM faculty, former CRC researcher Dr. Scott Hagen of Louisiana State University and former CRC summer research program participant Félix L. Santiago-Collazo (currently a graduate student at LSU).
Two CRC project leaders were recently recognized for their work by university and national organizations.
Dr. Gavin Smith, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the North Carolina State University School of Design, received the university’s 2019-2020 Alumni Association Outstanding Research Award and was inducted into the Research Leadership Academy. See more here.
A research team including Dr. Phil Berke of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning and Jaimie Masterson of Texas Target Communities at Texas A&M University was awarded the Environmental Design Research Association’s Certificate of Research Excellence for their paper “Integrating a Resilience Scorecard and Landscape Performance Tools into a Geodesign Process.” See more here.
Send us funding, job listings
We continue to add new job, internship and funding announcements to our website. To find information about open positions and funding opportunities from government agencies and partner institutions, visit our Opportunities page. If you have an opportunity to share, contact us at joshk [at] unc [dot] edu.
Learn more about Centers of Excellence
The Coastal Resilience Center is one of 10 current Centers of Excellence supported by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate, Office of University Programs. Our sister centers focus on subjects as varied as protection of critical infrastructure (physical and cyber) to maritime security, explosives and border management.
