Doubling Down on Reliability, Risk and Resilience From Disasters
Rice University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is strengthening its national leadership in disaster reliability, risk and resilience research, with faculty advancing solutions that protect communities, infrastructure and quality of life in the face of natural hazards.
Resilience to disasters is increasingly essential to public safety, national security and economic stability. Rice CEE researchers are addressing these challenges through innovations in probabilistic mechanics, infrastructure modeling, multihazard vulnerability analysis and predictive systems grounded in real world needs. Their work spans decades of leadership in resilience quantification, open data infrastructure and community scale modeling.
Key contributions include long standing collaborations with the National Institute of Standards and Technology Center of Excellence for Risk Based Community Resilience Planning, which has produced open resilience modeling environments and test beds in partner communities. Rice also plays a central role in the National Science Foundation Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure program through DesignSafe, a cyberinfrastructure platform that supports data sharing, advanced computing and reproducible research across the hazards engineering community. Locally, the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center has shaped flood and hurricane resilience strategies for the Houston and Gulf Coast region since 2007.
Rice CEE faculty influence national policy and practice through leadership roles on federal advisory boards, interagency flood risk initiatives and editorial leadership in leading engineering journals. These efforts help translate academic research into actionable guidance for infrastructure safety and disaster preparedness.
Building on this foundation, the department is expanding resilience focused research and education through new faculty hires and interdisciplinary initiatives. Recent additions bring expertise in uncertainty quantification, climate risk management, resilient materials, urban mobility, tropical cyclone modeling, artificial intelligence and computational hydrology. Together, these scholars strengthen Rice CEE’s capabilities in predictive modeling, adaptive systems and large scale multihazard analysis.
A major focus is the transition toward smart resilience, which integrates advanced computing, artificial intelligence, sensing technologies, adaptive design and digital twins with core engineering principles. Rice researchers are developing systems that can learn, adapt and respond to changing conditions, improving disaster forecasting, infrastructure restoration and emergency response.
Projects include National Science Foundation funded work on responsible AI for disaster resilience, NASA supported research using satellite data to improve coastal risk mapping and planning, and emerging efforts to apply quantum computing to infrastructure resilience assessment. These initiatives aim to deliver faster and more precise tools for managing complex systems under extreme conditions.
Partnerships with local, regional and national stakeholders remain central to Rice CEE’s mission. Through sustained collaboration with governments, industry, nonprofits and community organizations, faculty ensure that research translates into real world impact. Efforts such as flood alert systems that protect the Texas Medical Center, coastal resilience planning for Galveston Bay and expanded flood warning coverage across Texas exemplify how Rice research directly improves public safety.
By uniting engineering innovation, advanced analytics and strong partnerships with industry and communities, Rice CEE continues to set a national standard for reliability, risk and resilience. The department’s work is helping to build disaster ready infrastructure and communities equipped to face an increasingly uncertain future.
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Doubling down on reliability, risk and resilience from disasters