Since 2018, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR) has sponsored the Creativity Hubs initiative with the goal of changing how research and discovery happen at Carolina. The Creativity Hubs promote an environment where multidisciplinary investigators can nimbly leverage new advances that keep Carolina at the forefront of creativity and innovation.
The keys to successful Creativity Hubs include:
- Innovation and Impact: The ability to provide solutions to important challenges and the generation of new fundamental knowledge and create impact to benefit society, culture, community, the environment, or the economy.
- Convergence: Demonstration that the project takes advantage of expertise from multiple and diverse disciplines and promotes new ways of thinking that push disciplinary boundaries.
- Sustainability: The likelihood that the project will lead to support of larger and sustained extramural funding from federal agencies, industry, venture groups, or nonprofit organizations.
- Program Management Plan: Clearly articulated plan with description of feasibility, work-plan, milestones, project deliverables, evidence of alignment with large-scale extramural support, and timeline for soliciting external support.
In my September 2020 Research Matters post, I wrote about the success of the first two Creativity Hubs that completed their projects: Heterogeneity in Obesity and Sustainable Access to Safe Water.
This month, I want to highlight the success of a 2019-2020 winning Creativity Hub project, which after only one year of work has been successful in obtaining federal funding. The Dynamics of Extreme Events, People & Places (DEEPP) Hub is led by Elizabeth Frankenberg, director of the Carolina Population Center and the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Sociology, and brings together social and environmental scientists and engineers.
Their broad goal is to understand the environmental, economic, social, and psychological impacts of hurricanes and flooding in coastal Carolina communities. The team is combining survey information provided by people across the state with satellite imaging and flood mapping. They are developing a complete picture of impacts and recovery from hurricanes and floods – information that will inform effects of future hurricanes for a quicker and more complete recovery.
The DEEPP Hub researchers are using a three-pronged approach. The first is modelling and mapping exposure to risk. By comparing geophysical and flooding models with intensity measures, they will be able to develop an accurate picture of areas impacted from recent hurricanes in eastern North Carolina. The second part of their strategy involves aggregating administrative data from government agencies and non-governmental organizations. The third approach is to survey households about their own experiences.
As outlined in their proposal, the data obtained during the two-year project is laying the groundwork for a long-term project by:
- developing the measurement and sampling infrastructure for a cluster-based baseline survey of places and populations throughout eastern North Carolina that are at varying risk to extreme events;
- assembling and assessing extant “big data” resources that can be integrated to inform multi-scale analyses around the geographic distribution of hurricane physical impacts juxtaposed against the spatial and temporal variation in behaviors and outcomes of social-ecological systems affected by the physical impacts;
- developing fine-grained measures of response to hurricanes, within both natural and social systems using selected pilot sites;
- developing a conceptual framework and approach to predict how extreme events will affect social and ecological outcomes over the short and medium-term; and
- building interdisciplinary capacity to apply for external grants to support a large-scale long-term study of the impacts of extreme events on people and places, which integrates ground surveys with remote sensing and simulation models to understand social-ecological impacts of extreme events, predict responses to future events, and inform policies for impact mitigation and adaption.
With respect to point five, the DEEPP Hub, under the leadership of Frankenberg, Michael Piehler, and Rick Luettich, was just awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Growing Convergence Research Award based on the pilot data collected and the concepts outlined in their Creativity Hub proposal.
The DEEP Hub NSF award focuses on the concept that transformational adaptation and mitigation strategies for hazards in coastal regions require a convergent approach, integrating methods, insights, and data from the social sciences, the natural sciences, engineering, and geosciences. The results are intended to inform the design of effective strategies for mitigating impacts of extreme events for places and people. This is exactly the kind of research that the NSF is trying to stimulate, and the Creativity Hubs are providing pilot funding to generate foundational data for Carolinaʼs researchers to succeed in obtaining this type of external funding.
UNCʼs Creativity Hubs are research networks that concentrate talent and resources on bold ideas for defined periods of time – free from typical organizational boundaries, with the goal of moving new discoveries and ideas into practice. Congratulations to the DEEPP Hub for their success in obtaining an exciting NSF Growing Convergence Research Award.