Tracy Kijewski-Correa

Areas of Interest

Tracy Kijewski-Correa’s research is dedicated to enhancing the resilience and sustainability of hazard-exposed communities, with an emphasis on conceiving holistic responses to infrastructure vulnerabilities and tools that support science-informed decision making by diverse stakeholders.

She currently serves as the inaugural director of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Structural Extreme Event Reconnaissance (StEER) network, assessing the impacts of major hazard events using advances in data science. Leveraging these and other open data sources, she is similarly leading the development of regional simulation tools for hurricane risk assessment through the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Computational Simulation Center (SimCenter).

Her interdisciplinary work further explores how to effectively integrate field observations, simulations and experiments to advance coastal policy and practice. This includes participating in the design of a National Full-Scale Testing Infrastructure for Community Hardening in Extreme Wind, Surge, and Wave Events (NICHE), a major research infrastructure to experimentally simulate impacts of climatological hazards and mitigation solutions for frontline communities.

This work complements her ongoing efforts to study the uptake of mitigation guidance for self-recovery from disasters across the United States and around the world, most recently through her work in Lake Charles, Louisiana, funded under NSF’s Strengthening American Infrastructure program and service on the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine consensus study on Compounding Disasters in Gulf Coast Communities, 2020-2021. This work builds on her active involvement in the recovery following multiple disasters in Haiti, including the most recent earthquake in 2021.