Tracy Kijewski-Correa, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame and the William J. Pulte Director of the Pulte Institute for Global Development in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, has been appointed the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Structural Engineering and Hazard Resilience.
“Appointment to an endowed chair recognizes outstanding contributions to research, teaching, and service,” said Patricia J. Culligan, the Matthew H. McCloskey Dean of the College of Engineering.
“Professor Kijewski-Correa’s leadership in hazard resilience research, her ability to mobilize global engineering communities, and her deep commitment to translating science into action, have made a real difference in addressing some of the world’s most pressing infrastructure and climate-related challenges.”
Kijewski-Correa’s interdisciplinary research focuses on recovery after major disasters and how communities around the world can implement climate-adaptive measures when threatened or impacted by such events as hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and windstorms. To advance stakeholder-engaged research, policy and practice, she looks for ways to effectively integrate field observations, simulations, and experiments.
While much of Kijewski-Correa’s recent research as a Notre Dame faculty member has focused on Haiti and hurricane-affected communities in the United States, she holds leadership roles in several organizations dealing with responses to disasters worldwide. One is the National Science Foundation’s Structural Extreme Event Reconnaissance (StEER) network. As its inaugural director, she leads efforts collecting perishable data on building performance through coordinated post-disaster field reconnaissance to evaluate the impact of disasters and accelerate learning from them. These experiences informed her recent work as a member of a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine consensus study on the effect of compounding disasters along the Gulf Coast.
Wind is a major driver of damage in natural disasters worldwide. As president-elect of the American Association for Wind Engineering (AAWE), the Americas division of the International Association for Wind Engineering (IAWE), Kijewski-Correa helps set the research priorities and professional standards that guide how engineers assess wind hazards and design more resilient buildings and infrastructure.
She also leads the development of regional simulation tools for hurricane risk assessment through the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Computational Simulation Center (SimCenter) and is a co-PI for the National Full-Scale Testing Infrastructure for Community Hardening in Extreme Wind, Surge, and Wave Events (NICHE), a proposed major research infrastructure to experimentally simulate the impacts of climatological hazards and adaptation solutions for frontline communities.
Additionally, Kijewski-Correa, who joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2003, has received accolades as an educator, including the 2015 Dockweiler Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising and the 2016 Edmund P. Joyce Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Read more: Notre Dame researcher champions local leadership for life-saving disaster assessment
—Mary Hendriksen, Notre Dame Engineering