Required Courses for Doctoral Students
Doctoral students will enroll in two (0.5 credits) required courses and one elective (0.5 credits) course to earn a total of 1.5 Collaborative Specialization in Hazards, Risks, and Resilience credits.
HRR 9573 Natural catastrophes – modeling, assessing, and mitigating the impact (0.5)
This course will provide an overview of analytical/numerical approaches, i.e. catastrophe models, in modeling, assessing, and mitigating the impact of natural catastrophes. It covers four main elements of catastrophe models: hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and risk. More specifically, students will be exposed to various hazard modeling techniques (event frequency, hazard intensity, footprint modeling, etc.), gathering exposure information (databases from public sources, GIS-type data acquisition), vulnerability modeling (damage surveys, statistical modeling of structural fragility, and its use for damage assessment), and risk quantification and management (physical mitigation, financial protection, and risk communication). As appropriate, Financial/insurance implications and aspects of disaster risk policies will also be incorporated. The students are expected to comprehensively understand the sequences and their connections that comprise natural catastrophe modeling and assessment. This will be facilitated through assignments, computer lab sessions, and research-oriented individual projects.
2023 -2024
Day: September - December
Time: Lecture – In-person; Computer lab - In-person; 3 lecture/lab hours per week, 0.5 course.
Instructor: Katsu Goda
Course start date: September, 2023
HRR 9600Y Hazards, Risks, and Resilience Seminar PhD (milestone)
The main objective of the seminar series is to build community among students participating in the program across various home departments and for them to expand their network through events with external visitors. The presenters will be distinguished researchers who conduct research in these areas, faculty members who are participating in the collaborative specialization, Ph.D. students participating in the collaborative specialization satisfying the 3rd year presentation progression requirement (if not presenting elsewhere), as well as guest speakers from industry and government agencies. Students will be required to write a brief report reflecting on the event and how it connects to either their specific research interests/project and/or what topics covered in the core course.
Organizer: Katsu Goda & Reza Najafi
HRR 9574 L Natural hazard and risk evaluation in a team-based and experiential-learning environment (0.5)
Natural hazard and risk evaluation practice-oriented short course (0.5 credit)
**This course is a requirement for Collaborative Specialization**
This practice-oriented short course provides a team-based and experiential learning focus for the multi-hazard risk and resilience program. Students will receive the practical experience of working together within an interdisciplinary team, collecting primary observations (outdoors ‘in the field’) and assembling and integrating these observations (spatial datasets) for input to perform hazard and risk evaluations, thereby testing their modeled predictions. Delivery of the short course varies year to year - as a post-disaster reconnaissance mission (international or national field trip), a simulated post-disaster exercise on campus, or using case studies.
2024 -2025
Instructor: Sheri Molnar
Current schedule: May 2025 (confirm enrollment by/ in April 2025)
Maximum enrollment: 20
