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

Interdisciplinary Program in Risk & Resilience Engineering

Related Study Opportunities

PhD and Master of Science (MS)

Both offer a study track in Systems, Risk and Decision

Master of Engineering (MEng) in Risk Engineering

Offers a concentration in Environmental Engineering & Public Policy

Master of Engineering (MEng) in Civil Engineering

Offers a concentration in Systems Engineering and Optimization

Undergraduate Research

Primary Faculty

Mark Edward Borsuk

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

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Fundamental and applied problems in fluid dynamics, especially turbulence, and its role in environmental systems.

David Carlson

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

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.

Johann Guilleminot

Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental 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

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

Secondary Faculty

Wilkins Aquino

Anderson-Rupp Professor 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).

Marc A. Jeuland

Associate Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy

Lawrence N. Virgin

Professor 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: Satterwhite studies the genomics and epigenetics of environmental exposures in populations with clear health disparity. Her group identified the first genomic signature for pesticide exposure and is developing simple blood tests to diagnose early stage asymptomatic…

Adjunct Faculty

Emeritus Faculty

Henry Petroski

Aleksander S. Vesic Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Research Interests: Structural engineering; design; interrelationship between success and failure in design; nature of invention; history of engineering and technology.