Los Angeles - Richard Little, director of the University of Southern California Keston Institute for Infrastructure (www.usc.edu/keston), is part of an international team selected by the National Science Foundation to study the physical and social infrastructure impacts of the devastating tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean basin last December.
"The Keston Institute believes that the physical systems, human resources and organizational frameworks that deliver civil infrastructure services are so intertwined as to be inseparable," said Little. "This project should help develop a theoretical basis for what is emerging as a new paradigm in infrastructure systems and disaster resilience."
Led by Thomas Birkland, director of the Center for Policy Research at the State University of New York at Albany, the research team also includes Al Wallace, professor of decision sciences and information systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Pannapa Herabat, assistant professor of civil engineering at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand.
The research activity will collect perishable data regarding the recovery of coastal southern Thailand. It will be guided by an innovative approach that assumes that the social, political, economic, and demographic characteristics of the affected areas are linked in a manner that will permit the use of systems engineering principles. The data will be used in models that test the emerging hypothesis of coupling between physical and social systems and could lead to a better understanding of how vulnerable areas can become more disaster-resistant.
The NSF review panel that recommended the proposal for approval noted that "This is an excellent team of researchers, well-known for their work in disasters."
The Keston Institute for Infrastructure (www.usc.edu/keston) is part of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. It was established at the University of Southern California in 2002 through a major gift provided by Michael and Linda Keston and seeks to leverage the university's enormous intellectual resources to help California and the nation address critical infrastructure issues.