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Assistant Professor
Systems Design Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
University of Waterloo
Rodrigo is an Assistant Professor of complex systems, regional disaster risk, and resilience within the University of Waterloo’s Department of Systems Design Engineering. His research investigates how communities’ physical, economic, and social systems interact to create disaster risk and exacerbate socioeconomic and racial inequalities.
Rodrigo works in the interface between engineering, planning, and social sciences. His research investigates previous disasters using machine learning and survey data, and future risks using scenario-based, analytical and computational models with applications to earthquake, wildfire, and flood hazards accounting for climate projections. Rodrigo's expertise includes probabilistic hazard analysis, agent-based simulation, hazard and exposure modelling, machine learning, optimization, uncertainty quantification, and multi-shareholder decision-making to inform urban resilience planning.
Select Publications
- Costa, R., Bolte, E., Sharp, C., & Bowers, C. (2024). Repeated and localized flooding is an underestimated challenge for urban disaster risk management. Nature Cities 1.
- Costa, R., Wang, C., & Baker, J. (2022). Integrating place attachment into housing recovery simulations to assess population loss. Natural Hazards Review 23 (4).
- Wang, C., Costa, R., & Baker, J. (2022). Simulating post-earthquake temporary housing needs for displaced households and out-of-town contractors. Earthquake Spectra 38 (4).
- Costa, R., & Haukaas, T. (2021). The effect of resource constraints on housing recovery simulations. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 25.
- Costa, R., Haukaas, T., & Chang, S. (2020). Predicting population displacements after earthquakes. Journal of Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure 7 (4).