This project is developing courses that provide students multiple entry points for getting involved in community-focused disaster relief and resilience.
ENG177 – Global Disaster Resilience Scholars
This course is designed for first year engineering students who interact with a peer course at the University of Puerto Rico to come up with ideas for ways to improve local community recovery from past disasters and/or preparation for future ones.
ABE498 Engineering for Disaster Resilience + ABE492 Experiential Learning Abroad
Calling all majors! Be a part of this innovative service learning opportunity. ABE 498 is being offered for the spring 2021 semester.
ABE498. This is a project-based course for upperclass engineering students. In this course, students undertake the design of projects that can assist a local community in recovering from a disaster or in preparing for future ones. The students will develop plans, designs, and work on opportunities for collaboration and funding. This course is unique because students can repeat it (if the projects differ in the following term) and take on additional responsibility (see ABE593, below).
ABE492. The students travel to Puerto Rico during the intercession to gather data related to their projects and designs and interact with the local communities where the projects will be installed.
ABE593 Achieving Transdisciplinarity
Students who repeat ABE452 also enroll in the 1-credit 593 course which emphasizes collaboration and team skills. These students are expected to step into leadership roles, such as managing projects, for the ABE452 class.
Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates
Six projects (some in Illinois and some in Puerto Rico) will be offered as research experience for undergraduate (REU) projects in summer 2021. Read more about the projects…
[Extracurricular] Disaster Relief and Resilience Graduate Student Cohort Challenge
This cohort challenge includes graduate students (and post-doctoral students) from all over the country (and has included international students) that collaborate on a complex problem. The cohort practices collaboration and team skills in developing a transdisciplinary product useful to a stakeholder group.
The Disaster Relief and Resilience challenge first occurred in 2019-20 and was repeated in 2020-21. Read more about the graduate cohort challenges offered by a partner project, INFEWS-ER.