The IMEE program supports fundamental, multidisciplinary research on the impact of hazards and disasters upon civil infrastructure and society.
The program is focused upon research on the mitigation of, preparedness for, response to, and recovery from multi-hazard disasters.
Community and
societal resilience and sustainability are important topics within the research portfolio of IMEE.
The program is deeply multidisciplinary, integrating multiple perspectives, methods and results from diverse areas in engineering, social and natural sciences, and computing.
Among these are civil, mechanical, transportation and system engineering; sociology, cognitive science and psychology, economics, geography, political science and urban planning; geology, biology and meteorology; and applied computing.
Methodological innovations that span multiple, diverse disciplines are strongly encouraged.
Topics within the scope of the program include but are not limited to the following:
- Mitigation research focusing upon issues such as the analysis of structural and non-structural mitigation effectiveness, local capacity building for risk reduction, and social and physical vulnerability analyses;
- Preparedness research focusing on warning, risk communication, evacuation, multi-hazard emergency planning, and the effectiveness of pre-disaster planning;
- Response research focusing on infrastructure interdependencies and cascading effects, innovation and improvisation, and the role of new and emerging communication and computing technologies; and
- Recovery research examining links between disaster recovery and disaster mitigation, resilience metrics and models, resilience of interdependent infrastructure processes and systems, and social factors related to economic recovery and resilience.
The program does not support research on the normal, day-to-day operation of infrastructure systems.
Such research should be submitted to the Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) program.
It also does not support basic research on non-hazard or disaster- related structural engineering and geotechnical engineering.
Such research should be submitted to the Structural & Architectural Engineering (SAE) or Geotechnical Engineering and Materials (GEM) programs.
Finally, the program does not support hazard and disaster research that is strictly mechanistic and embedded in traditional, engineering disciplinary frameworks.
Such research should be submitted to the Engineering for Natural Hazards (ENH) program.