Author: Tonya Thornton

C-RASC Graduate Fellow and Faculty Member Published Research on the Predictive Resilience of Infrastructure Systems

Infrastructures are interdependent systems, and their interdependency can influence their resilience to routine failures and extreme events. PhD student Babak Aslani, C-RASC graduate fellow, and Shima Mohebbi, Assistant Professor of Systems Engineering and Operations Research, proposed a resilience assessment framework for interdependent water and transportation infrastructures to measure the impact of random failures due to aging infrastructures, natural disasters, and their cascading failures. The framework incorporates the physical network of these infrastructures, social vulnerability indicators, and predictive analytics for a sociotechnical resilience assessment. The findings of this study highlighted that the socioeconomic factors and land use features should be incorporated in interdependent resilience assessment for a more comprehensive and equitable resilience planning. This work is published in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, the International Journal of public sector decision-making.

The dataset for this research, obtained from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Census Data, City of Tampa utilities, and Florida Department of Transportation, are published in Data in Brief, a multidisciplinary and open access journal, to facilitate reusability for any future resilience study.

In January 2021, the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) launched the ASPA COVID-19 Pandemic Task Force (PTF) to serve as a communications channel for expertise and information related to the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). The task force was charged with organizing professional webinars, presidential panels, articles, section- and chapter-specific events, policy notes, and an edited volume for widespread dissemination to the ASPA membership and broader field of public administration. This special symposium is an outgrowth of those activities. We now recognize that the pandemic is unique in its severity and breadth, but the lessons of crisis and emergency management throughout history contribute to our understanding, planning, and response to the current pandemic and its appendant social crises. This symposium for Public Administration Review, then, gives us an opportunity to reflect on the constructs more broadly, with an eye toward conceptual development to inform present and future application to crises of this magnitude.

The C-RASC Interim Assistant Director, Dr. Tonya Thornton, and former Leadership Team member while an Assistant Research Professor at the Schar School, is one of the fellow guest editors and also serves as the Co-Chair for the PTF.

For more information, see: https://www.publicadministrationreview.com/2021/11/03/the-nexus-between-emergency-management-public-health-and-equity-responding-to-crisis-and-mitigating-future-hazards/