Planning: CRISES: Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Catastrophic Surprises

Understanding that a catastrophic surprising event (such as a major natural disaster, public health crisis, or unanticipated military or terrorist attack) is about to occur has long been an aspiration of public and private sector crisis managers. This planning grant seeks to develop the basic science needed to understand, theorize, and forewarn against potentially catastrophic surprises. It provides support to identify and recruit partners to establish a team for a national-level center that draws on multiple branches of knowledge to develop new ways of representing surprise dangers for officials, policymakers, and the public - especially those who are politically and economically marginalized - with the explicit goal of determining ways to better anticipate, avert, or contend with catastrophic surprise. To address hazards, whether surprising or not, requires an interdisciplinary approach that integrates knowledge of how the natural and built environments interact with social systems. Through this grant, the core planning team - comprised of faculty in the social, health, and engineering sciences - will bring together their expertise in quantitative and qualitative methods, community-based participatory research, risk modeling, field epidemiology, policy analyses and mapping, and quick response disaster research. They will identify and recruit additional partners across various scientific domains from the academic, private, and public sector to collaboratively conceptualize surprises that can prove catastrophic and identify application domains for critical investigation. Methods include numerous meetings for scientific discussion and deliberation; use of new technologies for remote collaboration; and creativity-enhancing approaches such as idea-matrices that have been identified in the management literatures. This planning grant surfaces new approaches that are needed, and for which no other disaster-related center cohesively addresses, providing a springboard to move beyond previous efforts to generate a transformative understanding of surprising events. The broader impacts of the grant include the development of a center proposal, an article that will present the planning group’s state-of-the-science thinking on surprises, and the integration of the intellectual capital developed during the planning stage into coursework for students pursuing work in the disaster management field. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.