Risk, Resilience, and Climate Change - from Power Systems to Communities: Seminar with Seth Guikema
Risk, Resilience, and Climate Change - from Power Systems to Communities
Abstract
The resilience of infrastructure and communities are of critical importance to society. However, standard approaches to these problems do not fully leverage recent advances in data-driven modeling. This talk gives an overview of research spanning from methods development to practical deployment of models. The talk starts by focusing on methods developed for risk and resilience analysis for electric power systems facing extreme weather events, discussing both their development and their deployment in utilities and the U.S. federal government. It then gives an overview of a recent project specifically addressing how climate change may influence the risk of power outages due to hurricanes in the U.S. The talk then gives an overview of recent projects leveraging novel data sources such as cell phone location data to understand and model community resilience more broadly.
Presenter
Seth Guikema is a Professor in the departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Industrial & Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan as well as the founding Co-Director of the Center for Risk Analysis Informed Decision Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is also a Professor II in the Department of Safety, Economics, and Planning at the University of Stavanger in Norway. He is Past-President and Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis and currently serves as the Area Editor for the Natural Hazards area in the journal Risk Analysis as well as on the editorial board of several other journals. In January 2027 he will start as the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair in Climate Risk and Resilience Analytics at Western University.
This event is open to all UWaterloo students, staff and faculty and is co-hosted by the Department of Systems Design Engineering and the Waterloo Climate Institute.
Time and Location: 12:00pm-1:30pm in E7 Faculty Hall (PSE 7303 & PSE 7363)
Graduate students are invited to attend a Graduate Student Roundtable from 2:00-3:00pm (location TBC).