Maritime Transport Disruption
Our interdisciplinary research team is comprised of research assistants and three faculty members:
Stephanie E. Chang (PI) is professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) and Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability (IRES). She held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Disaster Management and Urban Sustainability from 2004 to 2013. Her specialty is in the socio-economic impact of natural disasters. She has co-edited a book on Modeling Spatial and Economic Impacts of Disasters (2004) and published extensively on loss estimation models for disasters, infrastructure interdependencies, economic evaluation of disaster mitigations, and urban disaster recovery. Dr. Chang has served on the editorial boards of Earthquake Spectra and Papers in Regional Science, and on the U.S. National Research Council’s Committee on Disaster Research in the Social Sciences (2004-06) and its Committee on Earthquake Resilience – Research, Implementation, and Outreach (2009-11). She was awarded the 2001 Shah Family Innovation Prize from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), and was honored as EERI’s 2011 Distinguished Lecturer. She was a 2008 fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership program of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Dr. Chang received her B.S.E. in Civil Engineering from Princeton University and Ph.D. in Regional Science from Cornell University.
Hadi Dowlatabadi (co-PI) is Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) and Professor in Applied Mathematics and Global Change with IRES at the University of British Columbia. He is a University Fellow at Resources for the Future and Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering & Public Policy. Dr. Dowlatabadi’s research focuses on challenges at the interface of technology, energy, environment, health and public policy. His publications range in breadth from how to choose electricity generation technologies under uncertainty in technical progress and regulations to contextual determinants of malaria in different parts of the world. He has been a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and also on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He has over 150 peer-reviewed papers and helped 42 PhDs complete their research. In 1989, he was awarded a Warren Weaver Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation, where he co-designed the international program for Leadership in Environment And Development (www.lead.org). He serves on the editorial boards of four periodicals. He is co-founder of the non-profit Offsetters Climate Neutral Society, CTO of Green-Erg Technologies Ltd, and a founding Director of HydroRun Technologies Limited. He studied physics at university, obtaining his B.Sc. from Edinburgh University and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
Terje Haukaas (co-PI) is Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He conducts research on probabilistic modelling of a wide range of hazards, structures, and impacts, with particular emphasis on numerical simulation models. He has authored and co-authored more than thirty journal papers on probabilistic modelling in conjunction with reliability, sensitivity, and optimization analysis applied to various civil engineering problems. Software development is an integral part of Dr. Haukaas’ research; he developed the first version of the Matlab toolbox FERUM and he implemented the first reliability and sensitivity options in OpenSees. At UBC he has spearheaded the development of Rt, a program for multi-hazard, multi-model reliability and optimization analysis. Dr. Haukaas has received a number of teaching awards and a best-paper award from the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering (2007). He is a registered Professional Engineer in the province of British Columbia and a member of many scholarly committees. His professional experience includes working as an engineer in Norway on offshore engineering projects. He is currently teaching courses on Ship Structures in the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering program at UBC. Dr. Haukaas received his undergraduate degree from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.