Senior Researcher (PREP0002732)

Description

Climate & Community Resilience Planning PREP Research Associate

This position is part of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) Professional Research Experience (PREP) program. NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers on specific projects of mutual interest and thus requires that they be the recipients of a PREP award. The PREP program enables staff from a wide range of backgrounds to work on scientific research in many areas. Researchers become employees of universities identified as part of the PREP Program. In this position, the researcher will perform technical work that supports the scientific research of the collaboration.

 

A senior researcher or faculty member is sought with expertise in community resilience planning and applied climate science to support the development of a new addendum to the NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide and Playbook (https://www.nist.gov/community-resilience/planning-guide). The new addition will focus on aiding community practitioners with incorporating leading practices and methods to identify relevant climate data, scenarios, and natural hazard information to enhance the resilience of buildings, infrastructure, and communities when subjected to climate-affected hazards. The work will be informed by a series of workshops NIST organized in 2023 that focused on sea level rise (SLR) and coastal flooding, precipitation and inland flooding, and wildfires (https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.GCR.24-056). Other climate-related hazards may also be addressed. Future climate effects may include both acute shocks and persistent stressors – some examples include air and water temperature rise, non-hurricane wind events, changes in precipitation, sea level rise, and their associated storm surge and coastal flooding.

 

There is an urgent need for climate projections to be incorporated into community planning so that designers, planners, and engineers can address future climate impacts on community systems and services. Currently, communities are beginning to address this issue in varying ways with available tools and knowledge, but significant advances are still needed to develop guidance on how to characterize localized future climate and natural hazard conditions, how to account for these conditions in infrastructure design, and how to improve construction practices for future climate conditions. NIST has long-standing expertise in reducing natural hazard risks and enhancing the resilience of the built environment. Through this PREP research associate appointment, NIST is continuing to develop technical capacity in applied climate sciences and natural hazard risk reduction and seeks to advance community-scale resilience through climate-informed planning with a focus on advancing the design of buildings and infrastructure systems.

 

The PREP researcher will work with NIST researchers to develop a new addition to the NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide and Playbook to inform communities about leading practices for incorporating future climate conditions into community resilience planning for the built environment.  The researcher will identify leading practices for incorporating climate considerations in community resilience planning, which will be informed by 2023 NIST workshops, as well as identifying other sources and methods for determining appropriate sources of climate projections and their application to community planning. The primary focus of the PREP researcher will be to identify actionable methods for incorporating climate information in community resilience planning, which are supported by the best available science and case studies, and integrate them into the NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide and Playbook. 

 

Key responsibilities will include, but are not limited to:

·         In collaboration with NIST researchers, develop a new addendum to the NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide and Playbook to inform communities about leading practices for incorporating future climate conditions into resilience planning for sea level rise, precipitation, and wildfire, and associated hazard impacts, such as flooding.

·         Identify other climate-affected natural hazards that may affect future infrastructure performance, and associated climate science and community case studies.

·         Develop materials for the addendum that describe actionable methods for community resilience planning that are supported by best available science and case studies. 

Qualifications

Qualifications

§  A master’s or PhD degree in engineering, atmospheric science, or another disci