| NSF Org: |
CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 7, 2020 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 6, 2022 |
| Award Number: | 2041666 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Joy Pauschke
jpauschk@nsf.gov (703)292-7024 CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2020 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2024 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $299,824.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $307,824.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2022 = $8,000.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
110 8TH ST TROY NY US 12180-3590 (518)276-6000 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
110 8th St. Troy NY US 12180-3522 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
ECI-Engineering for Civil Infr, COVID-19 Research |
| Primary Program Source: |
01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
Much emphasis during the response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has rightly been on traditional public health efforts at controlling it; however, less prominent but no less vital is the role of the built environment itself in both amplifying and suppressing the effects of COVID-19. In the former case, this includes densely-packed, highly centralized physical work spaces, while in the latter this includes adaptive use of decentralized physical work spaces (such as private homes) or virtual ones (as for online learning). The prospect of co-occurrence of natural hazards (such as hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes) during the COVID-19 regime is likely to strain and possibly confound ongoing and future response efforts. Accordingly, this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) will explore the role of engineered structures and services within the built environment in order to improve efforts to prevent pandemic joint hazards from becoming societal disasters. This will require basic research in exploring new theories, methods, data and technologies for supporting mitigation, together with collaborations with multiple organizations, including the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure and its components (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org). This project will contribute to NSF's role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP).
This project will develop and disseminate a research framework and corresponding research agenda to support improved understanding of the role of the built environment in mitigating or amplifying risks associated with pandemic joint hazards. Case study data will be collected and analyzed, leading to an initial research framework. The research agenda will be developed with close cooperation from a broad and diverse set of researchers and practitioners in the hazards domain, resulting in a set of fundamental methodological, empirical and conceptual challenges around this topic. The project?s potentially radical re-examination of contemporary notions of hazard mitigation and performance-based engineering, as well as its engagement of new interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the relationship between physical and virtual facilities/services in mitigating pandemic joint hazards, represents a high-risk endeavor falling well outside the intellectual boundaries of current civil infrastructure and natural hazards research. The results of this work are expected to spur new lines of inquiry in various branches of engineering, potentially informing advances well beyond this project. Ultimately, this project's holistic and contextualized approach will contribute to the design of a more equitable, functional and safer built environment, well suited to a future that is likely to be marked by highly disruptive pandemics occurring jointly with other hazards.
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.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Changing patterns in the exposure of communities to natural and other hazards require new approaches to ensuring the flow of services from the built environment to those communities. This project has explored the impact of the co-occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic and other hazards on the education, food, housing and other sectors, particularly within under-resourced communities. It employed a broad range of archival data (including scholarly, government, and other reports) to identify challenges to ensuring the continued function of these sectors.
Initial work focused on underlying sources of fragility in these sectors and identified the need to expand and improve upon approaches to sector modeling. Specific facilities addressed in this work included nursing homes, prisons, and indigent housing. The study produced recommendations that highlighted the need to produce modeling approaches that can extend to the longer-term, focus on the provision of services, and consider the impact of various regulatory and governance frameworks on services provided to the community. Finally, it identified opportunities for enriching educational programs in various branches of engineering, science and social science to improve prospects for the inclusion of these concerns in future modeling work.
The second major contribution of this research was the development and illustration of a conceptual framework for understanding transitions in the design and use of the built environment, focusing specifically on the sectors of education, food and housing. The framework represents a paradigmatic shift from a static to a dynamic conceptualization of the structures and processes of the built environment. Changes in the built environment are framed as transitions between states, with the trajectory of those transitions determined by community vulnerability in relation to hazard exposure and capabilities for resistance and adaption to those hazards. Consistent with our initial work, we illustrated the use of this framework in a variety of cases in the foregoing sectors.
A key insight of this work (and one which reinforces similar emerging views) is that a wider perspective on criticality of and in the built environment is needed, one that is tied intimately to questions of demand (in terms of essential societal needs and functions) and supply (in terms of sources of security and stability, but also adaptive capacity).
Research in this direction is expected to yield new, more holistic, perspectives on questions of societal resilience to individual and compound hazards. Indeed, in contrast to traditional, highly centralized approaches to pursuing resilience, COVID-19 has shown that the capacity for adaptation resides in many and varied sources. A promising role for the field of engineering is to bring these sources into our purview, manage their risks accordingly, and seek to leverage them for the greater societal good.
Last Modified: 01/28/2025
Modified by: David Mendonca
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