About Us
Our vision is a world in which all communities thrive in the face of hazards. Our mission focuses on implementing living laboratories in real-life urban and rural communities and settings, grounded in the scientific exploration of the complex and nonlinear interactions among systems. The key insight underlying this mission is the transformative discoveries through the co-production of solutions with community leaders, residents, government, industry, and researchers. Our unique multidisciplinary approach, along with the close involvement of these stakeholders, will result in new research insights and policy instruments. As our overarching strategy, we seek to become a nationally and globally recognized center of resilience for disasters.
RIDER promotes “all-inclusive” and “equitable” disaster resilience for varying vulnerable population segments, and probes the underlying causes of disaster vulnerability in communities, while accounting for infrastructure characteristics, and social needs factors, and assessing their significance through various computational methods such as machine learning, causality, and regression models. These goals are critical since the associated risks are heterogeneous across population groups and space dependent on the available network, infrastructure, land use, and other localized conditions.
The Resilience Divide
Those who study natural and manmade disasters, as well as a society’s recovery from that disaster, have uncovered some startling facts. More and more, researchers and editors like those from Medium’s “One Concern” are seeing, “vast differences in which individuals and communities experience disaster impacts. For both acute impacts and long-term recovery, factors such as the country or region in which you live, your race, and your socioeconomic status play a large role in determining your ability to thrive — and to be resilient — in the face of a disaster.” This is known as the Resilience Divide. RIDER Center is a direct response to this challenge and one of our goals is to eliminate the discrepancy.
The Resilience Divide includes the “Vast differences in which individuals and communities experience disaster impacts. For both acute impacts and long-term recovery, factors such as the country or region in which you live, your race, and your socioeconomic status play a large role in determining your ability to thrive — and to be resilient — in the face of a disaster.” —One Concern
The RIDER Center promotes all-inclusive and equitable disaster resilience for vulnerable populations. RIDER leverages technology, data, and multidisciplinary research with a deep understanding of how the unique conditions of each community’s physical and social dynamics, available infrastructure, and land use affect resilience. Found at the nexus of engineering, science, and communities, RIDER’s solutions empower under-served communities with new tools, training, and enhanced partnerships between public, private, non-profit, and academic stakeholders. Improving disaster resilience will protect our vulnerable populations, save billions, and better our society as a whole; RIDER is leading that work.
