The ODU Resilience Collaborative team is excited to welcome our SUMREX students from Tougaloo College, who will be here from May 14th through June 22nd.

The SUMREX (SUMmer Research EXperience) program is offered by the DHS Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence (CRC COE). The program integrates the Center’s research and education projects and is intended to provide meaningful summer research experiences with CRC COE partners that have been identified as Education and Workforce Development (E&WD) partners. The purpose is to foster collaboration and integration, and to encourage student/professor relationships that could lead to graduate studies at CRC Research partner universities.

Our SUMREX students will be working with the faculty team comprising of Dr. Joshua Behr, Dr. Jose Padilla, and Dr. Erika Frydenlund of the Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC) on the project titled ‘Characterizing Regional Resilience.’  The students will work with the VMASC faculty team to characterize resilience as a concept, develop typologies of resilience, and identify measures of resilience. Some of the research tasks that the students will undertake include: reviewing literature, creating typologies, identifying measures, developing hypotheses, performing exploratory data analysis, and preparing and delivering oral presentations.

In addition to working with VMASC faculty on research, the SUMREX students will also be housed within the ODU School of Public Service (SPS). The SUMREX students will interact with SPS graduate students (MPA and PhD in Public Administration and Policy) who will share information about their graduate school journey and their research interests. The SUMREX students will also, as available, participate in other enrichment activities along with other undergraduate students participating in Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at ODU.

Project Description:
This project focuses on characterizing, categorizing, and measurement of the broad concept of resilience. The concept of resilience is used in our discourse in many different contexts and is necessarily far-reaching. It may refer to culture, perceptions, behavior, physical assets and infrastructure, communication protocols, and public and private delivery of services, as well as system of these systems, among others. In addition, implicit is that the considered asset or system is resilient to some force, whether this force is either steady or dynamic over time, or whether is it a sudden puncturing of the equilibrium of normalcy.  These forces may be in the form of changing natural systems, human migration, displacement and upheaval, severe weather events, and intentional human-induced immediate shocks to an asset or system. Our understanding and treatment of resiliency has implications for public policy, shapes culture, informs engineering, enlightens homeland security, and promotes humanity.