Sara Hamideh, an Iowa State University assistant professor of community and regional planning, has received a $60,000 sub-award from Colorado State University’s Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, which is funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Working closely through the center on more than 40 individual tasks, teams of researchers from numerous university partners and disciplines are developing a computational environment (known as IN-CORE) to help define the attributes that make communities resilient. By systematically modeling how physical, economic and social infrastructure systems in real communities interact and affect recovery efforts following a natural disaster, the teams will provide a quantitative and science-based approach to community resilience assessment.

The goal is for IN-CORE to answer detailed questions on the lingering effects of disasters on communities — including such factors as population dislocation, the health and wellbeing of residents and fiscal impact — allowing users to optimize community disaster-resilience planning and post-disaster recovery strategies.

Hamideh’s expertise is in modeling housing recovery using statistical techniques and in analyzing community recovery processes using qualitative date and methods. Since April 2016 she has collaborated with the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning on the housing recovery task, which involves gathering and analyzing data to build models that best predict housing recovery trajectories and can help communities better plan to restore residential areas damaged by disaster.

The new sub-award will support continued work on housing recovery modeling and other resiliency research with the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning for the next three years.