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MCML along with an interdisciplinary team wins Vanderbilt TIPs funding

Posted by on Thursday, June 2, 2016 in News.

MCML, along with an interdisciplinary team from Vanderbilt has been selected as one of the 2016 awardees of the Trans-Institutional Program (TIPs) initiative. The TIPs initiative, launched by Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos, is in its second year. The five-year program supports trans-institutional research and teaching, which was a foundation of the university’s Academic Strategic Plan.

Project Participants:
School of Engineering: Caglar Oskay (PI), Mark Abkowitz, Julie Adams, Hiba Baroud and Craig Philip
College of Arts & Science: Ralf Bennartz and Jennifer Trueblood

Vanderbilt Initiative for Intelligent Resilient Infrastructure Systems (IRIS)
A perfect storm is brewing involving civil infrastructure protection. On one hand, infrastructure protection systems are exposed to more natural disturbances (e.g., hurricanes, tsunamis, drought-flood cycles) with ever increasing severity, as a consequence of climate change. On the other, the nation’s civil infrastructure is aging and in poor health, with increasingly restricted budgets allocated to maintain, repair and restore them. The consequences of inaction are severe as demonstrated very recently during Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and across the nation and around the world. In the proposed initiative, the core team, which includes faculty from A&S and Engineering with complementary and cross-disciplinary expertise, will build a hub for intelligent resilient infrastructure system for research and education innovation. The project will develop a prototype test-bed and “experimentation ground” that could become a “core facility” for implementing and validating new ideas by Vanderbilt researchers.