silver balls balancing

Risk & Resilient Systems

Faculty in Duke's Risk & Resilient Systems group focus on finding new and better ways to model, estimate and quantify the dynamics, uncertainty and risks prevalent in diverse engineered and natural systems—with the ultimate goals of reducing risk, informing decisions and developing more resilient systems.

Our research methods include dynamic systems analysis, numerical modeling, uncertainty quantification and parallel computing. Our work has applications in diverse areas, such as environmental and population health; energy and climate systems; insurance risk assessment and financial engineering; and hazard mitigation and resilient infrastructure.

Research Areas

  • Bayesian decision theory and environmental risk assessment
  • Modeling, identification, and control for natural hazard mitigation
  • Uncertainty quantification in computational mechanics 
  • Data analytics and numerical modeling
  • System dynamics, nonlinear dynamics and optimization
  • Engineering economics
  • Resilience engineering and sustainability

MAJOR CENTERS & INITIATIVES

Related Study Opportunities

PhD and Master of Science (MS)

Master of Engineering (MEng) in Risk Engineering

Master of Engineering (MEng) in Civil Engineering

Undergraduate Research

Primary Faculty

Mark Edward Borsuk

James L. and Elizabeth M. Vincent Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Mathematical models for integrating scientific information on natural, technical, and social systems; Bayesian network modeling with regular application to environmental and human health regulation and decision making; novel approaches to climate change assessment, combining…

Andrew Bragg

Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Physics and modeling of turbulence and turbulent transport; theoretical and computational fluid dynamics; applied mathematics.

David Carlson

Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Machine learning, predictive modeling, health data science, statistical neuroscience

Jeseth Delgado Vela

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Biofilms in the urban water cycle, nitrogen cycling microbial communities, public health surveillance via wastewater, and microbial communication in biofilms

Henri P. Gavin

Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Structural dynamics, earthquake engineering, seismic hazard mitigation for building contents, nonlinear dynamics, system identification, optimal control with application to systems with controllable damping.

Guglielmo Scovazzi

Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Finite element methods, computational fluid and solid mechanics, multiphase porous media flows, computational methods for fluid and solid materials under extreme load conditions, turbulent flow computations, instability phenomena.

Mark Wiesner

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Membrane processes, nanostructured materials, transport and fate of nanomaterials in the environment, colloidal and interfacial processes, and environmental systems analysis

Marta Zaniolo

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Water resources planning and management, drought modeling and control, flexible climate change adaptation, conceptual and data-driven systems modeling, reinforcement learning for water systems, multi-objective control, feature extraction.

Secondary Faculty

Wilkins Aquino

Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science

Research Interests: Computational mechanics, finite element methods, computational inverse problems and their applications in engineering and biomedicine, scientific computing, computational acoustics and acoustics-structure interaction, coupled chemo-mechanics (e.g., electrochemistry-mechanics).

Johann Guilleminot

Paul Ruffin Scarborough Associate Professor of Engineering

Research Interests: Computational mechanics, mechanics of heterogeneous materials, molecular dynamics simulations and atomistic-to-continuum coupling, stochastic solvers, statistical inverse problem and model validation, stochastic analysis, uncertainty quantification in science and engineering

Marc A. Jeuland

Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy

Lawrence N. Virgin

Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science

Research Interests: Study of the behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems, including the investigation of the fundamental nature of nonlinear systems based on a mathematical description of their underlying equations of motion and the application of recent results from nonlinear dynamical systems…

Research Faculty

Lisa L Satterwhite

Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Molecular epidemiology of environmental exposures, pesticide exposure and Parkinson’s disease, Cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms and ALS, and creating climate change resilient rural communities.

Adjunct Faculty

Christine Ogilvie Hendren

Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Placeholder for headshot

Lyesse Laloui

Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Daniel Vallero

Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering