This education and training initiative is a comprehensive, creative program of mentoring for recently appointed junior faculty at research universities with an interest in natural hazards and disasters. We seek to (1) identify and recruit another cohort of well-trained social scientists and engineers with an appreciation for the social aspects of hazards, who will undertake research about societal aspects of extreme events; (2) engage this cohort of researchers in discussions about interdisciplinary social science scholarship as it relates to research about extreme events; (3) enable this cohort of researchers to undertake sustained research on these topics by providing tutorials on proposal development and research dissemination, particularly in scholarly outlets; and (4) foster an expanded network of social scientists undertaking research on extreme events.
These goals will be accomplished through a mentoring program involving scholars from a broad range of disciplines as mentors. The project includes two workshops, one-on-one mentoring, and research and writing activities. A final evaluation report will assess the program's effectiveness. This project will attract junior faculty to a field of student in which a number of senior researchers are expected to retire soon. A major goal of the project is to identify and recruit scholars from underrepresented groups to this field of research.
Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards and Disasters Research is a fellowship and mentoring program designed to recruit junior faculty to the interdisciplinary field of natural hazards and disasters research. This project is the third iteration of this program and, like the prior two projects, led by Texas A&M and by the University of North Carolina, was remarkably successful. The project is important for two broad reasons. First, the damage done by natural and humanly caused disasters is increasing, as more people are exposed to a wide range of hazards. Second, the research field needs new researchers to help understand how disasters happen, why they hurt people and communities, and what can be done to prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from disasters. A 2006 National Academies of Science report noted the need to attract new and younger researchers to the field. This version of the enabling project brought together eight faculty mentors—comprising some of the most highly regarded disaster researchers in the United States—with 17 junior faculty members at U.S. universities. Each senior mentor was paired with two (and, in one case, three) junior colleagues to help the new researchers understand the social science aspects of natural disasters, the existing state of research, where innovation was needed, and how to seek research funding for their research. This version of the project was remarkably successful in attracting a diverse set of researchers to the group. Of 17 researchers, seven were women, and two of those women were African American. This diversity is important because disasters affect women, children, the elderly, and racial minorities in different ways, while the research community has historically consisted of white males. Particularly notable is the number of women engineers in this group. We slightly redesigned the project so that engineers with an interest in the interdisciplinary application of engineering science and social science would participate. Greater diversity in the research community will yield more diverse research directions, which will likely spur innovation in the field. Based on data collected from the junior faculty fellows, we know that this project is already having a significant influence on research and practice. The fellows in this cycle have collectively written or co-written 293 peer-reviewed scientific articles and 90 book chapters, as well as three books. They have raised substantial sums from the NSF and other funders to support their research. And five of those fellows have already achieved promotion and tenure at their institutions; tenure is a sign of scientific productivity and excellence. We hope that, taken together, the three rounds of the Enabling Project will serve as a model for interdisciplinary mentoring of junior researchers regardless of the field or disciplines involved, both in the United States and overseas. The principal investigator on this round of the Enabling Project has received inquiries from scholars in Europe who are interested in establishing similar programs, and the PI has advised scholars in the United States on similar projects.
