The focus of the Meetup is on building campus wide faculty relationships, discovering unique expertise (areas of research, data sets, tools and partnership) already available at Rice, and forming exploratory collaboration. Our hope is that the Meetup will serve to initiate conversations and incubate research collaborations that will position Rice to seek additional funding for research and scholarship. Additionally, we hope to create lasting partnerships within Rice and ultimately with the city of Houston that will help explore and develop new education and research directions.
What is the Smart Resilience Meetup? The Meetup is organized as a poster and networking event designed for faculty (with their research groups) to showcase their research and scholarship that relates to the broad topic of “Smart Resilience”. This is an opportunity to get to know your colleagues that are doing (or exploring doing) research within the topic of Smart Resilience and to showcase your research.
How can you participate? Faculty-led research groups are strongly encouraged to prepare a poster highlighting their Smart Resilience research and ideas for research. While it is critically important that faculty participate in the Meetup by presenting and discussing research collaboration opportunities, we also encourage you to invite your research group to join the Meetup to help present posters.
What is Smart Resilience? Resilience is often defined as the ability of individuals, communities, or businesses to prepare for, absorb, adapt and rapidly recover from a potentially disruptive event. Smart Resilience also refers to the capacity of a city to develop and respond to the ongoing mulitdeminsional needs of its citizens. As cities grow, become smart and more interconnected opportunities and challenges emerge regarding understanding and promoting resilience. The theme of “Smart Resilience” explored in this Meetup implies a future looking perspective on the planning, assessment, design, and management of cities facing multiple stressors—one that may leverage a combination of smart technologies and innovations, urban design, and policy to achieve resilience when challenged by stressors. These stressors include population growth and urbanization, inequities, aging infrastructure, natural and manmade hazards, and a changing climate. The transformation of our cities to achieve Smart Resilience will require innovation and synergy across diverse disciplines and perspectives.
Why should you attend the Smart Resilience Meetup? To network and collaborate with your colleagues across the University and to explore how your research may intersect or enable research and scholarship in the area of Smart Resilience. Your colleagues may be doing research that could greatly benefit you and your research. The opportunity for cross disciplinary fields in research has never been greater!
No poster? No problem! While we clearly like to have a large set of posters to network around we strongly encourage you to attend even if you do not have a poster to contribute. This is a great opportunity to network with your colleagues at Rice. (Note, if you are submitting an abstract you are automatically registered). As stated before, the success of this event is a function of faculty participation and we discourage participation that is not faculty led.