Dear CEE community:
The Edward Wenk, Jr. Endowed Lecture is confirmed on Wednesday, December 8 at 5:00pm, held in Fishery Sciences Building, Room 102. This year’s speaker is Dr. Tracy Kijewski-Correa, Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences, and Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
2021 Edward Wenk, Jr. Endowed Lectureship
Promoting Inclusive Adaptation to Coastal Hazards at the Interface
of Research, Policy and Practice
Featuring Dr. Tracy Kijewski-Correa
Leo E. and Patti Ruth Linbeck Collegiate Chair and Associate Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences
Keough School of Global Affairs
University of Notre Dame
Wednesday, December 8 at 5:00pm, followed by Q&A
Fishery Sciences Building, Room 102.
The in-person lecture will be live streamed here
Abstract: With a record $210B in natural hazard damages in 2020 ($95B in the US alone), there is increasing need to reduce losses, population displacement, and outmigration due to climate-driven hazards. These record-setting impacts are only the latest in decades-long trend: four of the five costliest hurricanes struck in the past decade (Harvey, Irma, Maria, Sandy), while Katrina and Harvey were America’s costliest disasters, each exceeding $100B in losses. These events underscore the particularly acute risks to coastal regions threatened by sea level rise and anthropogenic warming. With 127 million Americans (40% of US population) living in coastal counties — an increase of nearly 40 million since 1970 — annual losses associated with hurricanes are predicted to outpace the growth of the US economy. While it might be assumed that such evidence of the mounting consequences of coastal living would be sufficient to drive action, there has been limited success in closing the knowledge-action gap among key coastal stakeholders.
This seminar adopts a convergence approach, operating at the intersection of engineering and social science, to examine the role academics can play in driving more risk-responsive policy and practice within coastal communities. A sampling of projects engaging stakeholders in different contexts at different scales of influence will demonstrate how incompatibilities in spatial and temporal scales of decision making, as well as misalignment of incentives in regulatory and market systems, affects the uptake of the latest engineering guidance.The seminar will more importantly question how such understanding should in turn in inform how engineers conceptualize, execute
and translate their research.
Bio: Tracy Kijewski-Correa is the Leo E. and Patti Ruth Linbeck Collegiate Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. Jointly appointed as an Associate Professor of Global Affairs, she also serves as co-director of the Keough School’s Integration Lab (i-Lab) and faculty fellow at a number of institutes focused on global development and real estate. Her research is dedicated to enhancing the resilience and sustainability of hazard-exposed communities, with an emphasis on conceiving holistic responses to infrastructure vulnerabilities and developing tools that support scienceinformed decision making by diverse stakeholders. She currently serves as the inaugural director of NSF’s Structural Extreme Event Reconnaissance (StEER) network, coordinating data collection following major hazard events. Her contributions have been recognized by awards from the American Society of Civil Engineering, American Political Science Association, Institution of Civil Engineers, International Association for Wind Engineering, and American Association for Wind Engineering. Kijewski-Correa is formally trained as a Civil Engineer with a specialization in Structural Engineering, earning her Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and PhD from the University of
Notre Dame.
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The lectureship is made possible by a generous donation from Dr. Edward Wenk, Jr., professor emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering and science policy adviser to the U.S. Congress and three presidents.
Inquiries, contact Karen Heath at karenh3@uw.edu
This lecture series is open to the public. No RSVP required