National Disaster Research Council, NRC Associateship Program, Hazard Vulnerability Analysis

The Pacific Disaster Center joined the National Academies Associateship Programs in 2005, and began hosting National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellows in January 2006. National Academies Associateship Programs are designed to facilitate research by doctoral-level scientists and engineers to apply their special knowledge and research talents to areas that are of interest to them, and to host laboratories and centers. Participating organizations receive a stimulus to their programs by the presence of highly motivated, recent doctoral graduates.

Awardees are paired with a senior-level scientist at each participating laboratory to facilitate a mentorship in directed studies related to the awardees' proposed research. Recent awardee Bryan J. Boruff worked for 13 months with Chief Scientist Stanley Goosby to develop a coastal hazard vulnerability decision support tool for Asia Pacific and Indian Ocean nations. This research contributed to the development of a method for assessing coastal vulnerability to tsunami hazards by integrating the physical and socioeconomic characteristics of populations in the Pacific region.

In September 2006, Dr. Suzanne Jul arrived at PDC to work on DiveArch. The goal of the DiveArch project is to design a computational architecture for interactive agent-based Disaster Information and Visualization Environments (DIVEs), and to prototype an application-development framework implementing that architecture. Concurrent with the architectural development, the DiveArch project will work with two application development projects. These projects will serve as case studies to ensure that DiveArch identifies and addresses the needs of DIVE development accurately.

Postdoctoral research awards through the National Academies are sponsored by thirty federal laboratories and centers at over one hundred locations in the United States and overseas. Approximately 1,000 applications are received annually for the nearly 350 new awards made in the Associateship Programs. Applications undergo competitive peer review by National Academies' panels and are judged on quality of proposed research as well as on their academic accomplishments.

For more about this program at the Pacific Disaster Center, please contact us at info@pdc.org.