The Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center conducts convergent research that integrates numerous academic disciplines while engaging with community partners on priority hazard and disaster challenges. As a leader in the field, the Center’s unique expertise is at the intersection of hazard risk and resilience within the built and social environments.

Interdisciplinary Grants

Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence; $20,000,000; funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this project includes researchers from 21 universities across the fields of Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Planning, Economics, Atmospheric Science, Marine Affairs, Public Policy, Public Health, Environmental Economics, Psychology, Oceanography, Industrial Engineering, Computer Science, History, and Sociology. The Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center’s team includes Jaimie Masterson, Siyu Yu, and Matthew Malecha along with graduate and undergraduate students who are developing and expanding the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS). PIRS assists local practitioners to assess the degree to which networks of local plans target geographic areas most prone to hazards and evaluate the coordination of local plans. 

Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning; $20,000,000; funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Led by Colorado State University, this project includes 90 researchers and students from 13 universities. Researchers are drawn from the fields of Civil Engineering, Structural Engineering, Planning, and Economics. Faculty from the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center involved in the project include Co-PIs Walter Gillis Peacock, Shannon Van Zandt, Nathanael Rosenheim, Maria Koliou, and Michelle Meyer along with Center alumni Donghwan Gu and Sara Hamideh. Over 15 Texas A&M University graduate students have received training through this project. The project is producing a common data architecture by collaborating with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to ensure that data from around the world can be seamlessly integrated into a robust computational environment known as IN-CORE. IN-CORE will allow users to optimize community disaster resilience planning and post-disaster recovery strategies intelligently using physics-based models of inter-dependent physical systems combined with socio-economic systems.

Southeast Texas Urban IFL (SETx-IFL): “Equitable solutions for communities caught between floods and air pollution”; $17,000,000 funded by the Department of Energy. Led by the University of Texas at Austin, the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center is collaborating with researchers from Lamar University, Prairie View A&M University, and Oak Ridge National Lab across the fields of Environmental Engineering, Planning, Agriculture, Civil Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Sustainability, Sociology, Landscape Architecture, Biology, Climate Science, Chemical Engineering, and Geosciences to provide quantitative understanding of projected climate change impacts across the Southeast Texas region in a way that will improve the practice of resilience science and equitable community resilience to flooding and air pollution. Michelle Meyer leads the social science component of the project along with fellow HRRC faculty Nathanael Rosenheim, Dongying Li, Siyu Yu, and Galen Newman. Texas Target Communities is coordinating community engagement. Six graduate students are currently working with the research team on these goals.

The Gulf Resilience Coastlines and People Research Hub

The Focused Coastline and People Focused Research Hub at Texas A&M will conduct research to help tribal communities prepare for coastal hazards. Researchers at Texas A&M University are leading this effort thanks to a five-year, nearly $4.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

View NSF Coastlines & People Project

Texas Sustainable and Resilient Planning Atlases

View the Texas Sustainable and Resilient Planning Atlases

Our planning atlases are online mapping tools designed as spatial decision support systems. They provide detailed data on hazards, the built environment and population demographics that affect hazard and disaster risk. This information is useful for community and household hazard planning. These maps visualize physical and social vulnerability information to local stakeholders. They are specifically used for local emergency managers to plan hurricane evacuation zones and routes as with our previous collaborations in the Texas Valley and Coastal Bend areas.

HRRC Research Initiatives

The Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center (HRRC) Research Initiatives are led by faculty within the Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning department and HRRC Faculty Fellows across Texas A&M University. Through these initiatives, the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center provides mentorship and support to faculty members to further develop their research agendas on emerging research topics and to expand the visibility and reach of their innovative work.

View Research Initiatives

Research & Publications

Learn more about all of our research projects, both current and past, as well as publications.

Current Research Projects Past Research Projects HRRC Publications