Furbish/0525781 (paired with Mauldon/CMS-0529898) Vanderbilt This award supports a national workshop to explore and set forth emerging opportunities for research collaboration between engineering and geoscience under the theme of Process-Driven Risk Assessment and Mitigation in the Context of Sustainable Development. Workshop participants will represent a broad cross-section of specialties, backgrounds and career stages. The product of the three-day workshop, to be hosted by Vanderbilt University during the summer of 2005, will be a report to NSF and the research community on the scientific and societal needs for such collaboration, and a list of priority cross-disciplinary research areas.
Intellectual Merit The workshop theme will center on assessments of process-driven system risk and reliability, and on risk reduction and mitigation strategies in the context of system behavior. The systems to be examined involve both natural and designed components and may necessitate modeling of system behavior over time scales wherein engineering design lives approach the "deep" time of geological and geophysical processes. The workshop organizers mean to aim beyond current approaches to assessment of system behavior that are based largely on extant physical and environmental conditions, and instead focus on next-generation methods and tools that assess active processes rather than current state, and incorporate dynamical modeling of relevant time-dependent processes to anticipate future behavior. In addition, the workshop organizers envision "risk and reliability" as being applied to the health and functioning of environmental and ecological systems, as well as being applied in a conventional engineering sense to human and social risks and designed-system reliability. The organizers believe that certain topical areas are poised to gain immediately from exchanges between the engineering and geoscience communities, either because advances are likely to emerge directly from the joint expertise of these communities, or because these areas involve presently at-risk systems (e.g. coastal lands and wetlands).
Broader Impacts A pressing need exists to develop and strengthen cooperative cross-disciplinary efforts in the engineering and geoscience communities - efforts that are focused on: (i) collaborative research in key areas where advances and innovations will require the knowledge and perspectives of both disciplines; (ii) developing and improving educational alliances between these communities; and (iii) applying engineering and geoscience expertise jointly to problems of increasing societal importance and complexity, both in the U.S. and worldwide. The reasons for this need are compelling. Projected population growth within the U.S. and worldwide over the next several decades will lead to demands for resources, including habitable space, at unprecedented scales, and with this an equally unprecedented need for strategies and technologies aimed at achieving the sustainable use of these resources - balancing utilization of resources and habitat with their protection and preservation for the long-term well-being of ecological systems and humans alike. These concerns fundamentally involve the intersection of engineering and the geosciences, and point clearly to the need to mesh existing knowledge and expertise of these disciplines in addressing questions of risk, mitigation strategies and sustainability of future development, as well as the need to develop novel ways of thinking about complex systems, natural and engineered, and their coupled behavior over times scales ranging from minutes to decades and centuries.
