NSF grant seeks to improve technological solutions to natural disasters
A Mississippi State sustainable bioproducts faculty member is joining scientists throughout the Southeast to study the most effective way to reach underserved communities impacted by natural disasters.
Beth Stokes, associate professor in the Department of Sustainable Bioproducts, is part of a $150,000 National Science Foundation’s Sustainable Regional Systems Research Networks planning grant, to focus on disaster-prone and impacted rural areas in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
The information collected on hurricanes and long-term climate-related impacts will be modeled and become a prototype that can be used to increase community preparedness and resiliency in the event of future disasters.
“Our goal is to initiate dialogue with underserved communities through outreach,” said Stokes, who is also a researcher in the MSU Forest and Wildlife Research Center. “We can then determine which technologies we should synthesize into modular community support systems to provide food, infrastructure, energy and water resources following disasters, and to establish a network of distribution locations for eventual rapid deployment of these systems.”
Through interactions with stakeholders, the team will discover perception of risks and experience in disaster-prone areas that will result in specific questions to pursue in developing technological solutions.
“This grant allows our multi-state team to engage with community members in a series of workshops, road-mapping activities, stakeholder meetings, surveys and more to synthesize information and develop a full proposal at the end of this one-year planning grant,” Stokes said. “It is important to note that this is a two-part program, a planning grant and then a full proposal based on the information we discover during the initial program.”
The team is led by Debalina Sengupta, associate director of the Gas and Fuels Research Center in the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station. In addition to Stokes and Sengupta, the research team includes Seth Blitch, director of coastal and marine conservation at The Nature Conservancy of Louisiana; Ignasi Palou-Rivera, CTO/ CEO of the RAPID Manufacturing Institute; Lucy Mar Camacho of Texas A&M University-Kingsville and Damien Ejigiri from Southern University.
Grace Jones | Agriculture and Natural Resources Marketing
