Welcome

The Center for Disaster Management at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs provides a school-wide locus to support research, education, and training projects that focus on extreme events. The goal of the Center is to develop a coherent approach for research and analysis on policy issues related to disaster risk reduction and management that cross interorganizational, interdisciplinary, and interjurisdictional boundaries. To meet this goal, the Center engages in professional education and training of the next generation of policy makers, analysts, and managers who will be responsible for disaster risk reduction and management in public, private, and nonprofit organizations. The need for such a center is evident in the increasing number of public, private, and nonprofit organizations that are re-examining their capacity to withstand threats from all hazards - natural, technological, and deliberate. The Center currently has four research projects operating under the aegis of the Interactive, Intelligent, Spatial Information Systems (IISIS) Laboratory that address problems in disaster risk reduction, situation assessment, and decision support. These projects include: 1) Secure CITI: A Secure Critical Information Infrastructure for Disaster Management, a collaborative project with researchers in Computer Science that is now in its final year of a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation; 2) Designing Resilience for Communities at Risk: Improving Decision Making to Support Collective Action under Stress; carried out in conjunction with researchers in Computer Science and engineers from Bandung Institute of Technology to develop a testbed for early tsunami detection in Padang, Sumatra, Indonesia, funded by the National Science Foundation; 3) Dynamic Incident Management, a project to develop a testbed for decision support systems in the Pittsburgh Metro Region, funded by the MITRE Corporation; and 4) Decision-Support System for Integrated Adaptive Response, one arm of a larger five-year grant awarded to the Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center, Graduate School of Public Health and funded by the Centers for Disease Control. While these four projects are related in both design and implementation and all will use the JIISIS prototype, the performance of each of the projects is enhanced by the Center's shared administration and management. Within GSPIA, the Center serves three major functions. First, it serves as a focal point for research and analysis on timely, reconnaissance studies of mitigation and response to actual disaster events. Such reconnaissance studies are invaluable in conducting an initial assessment of a set of events that precipitated disaster in order to frame key questions for research proposals that can be submitted for external funding. Second, the Center maintains a web site for the timely search and exchange of information related to disaster events, with a particular focus on information technologies and the changing role of technology in shaping communication of information and coordination of actions in response to disaster events. Finally, the Center synthesizes findings from ongoing research and evolving practice to prepare timely policy papers for practicing agencies on recommendations for innovative performance to reduce disaster risk. All three functions will be integrated into GSPIA's fundamental mission of teaching, research, and public service. A key goal of the Center for Disaster Management is to educate the next generation of researchers, analysts, policy makers and professional managers in disaster management-related disciplines through a world-class integrated program of innovative knowledge generation. It will enhance the quality of the educational experience for graduate and professional students who participate in the Center's research and education projects. Center faculty and staff will develop an educational program to aid in the training of disaster management professionals and policy makers in multiple areas. This program will include a clearinghouse of educational and training resources, such as courses, modules, and materials to enhance existing courses or to aid development of new courses. An inventory of the University's faculty and professionals will provide a database of individuals who can serve as lecturers or who can conduct peer-review for newly developed educational and training materials. The Center provides a visible point of contact for public agencies at local, state, national and international levels of jurisdiction for research and education in disaster management. As governmental agencies have the legal responsibility for protecting citizens from extreme events, GSPIA provides a natural location for a Center for Disaster Management at the University. This role becomes increasingly important as the incidence and scale of disasters increase in cost, complexity, and consequences. The research currently underway at the IISIS Laboratory involves interaction with local, state, national, and international public officials. The Center facilitates and supports a systematic, coherent program of research, education, and professional training with public officials at each of these jurisdictional levels. Such coherence is essential as an evolving response system in major disaster events necessarily involves operations at each participating level of jurisdiction and the integration of these distinct levels of operation into a national system of mitigation, response, and recovery.