The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $2.5 million to an interdisciplinary, multicampus University of California research team, partnering with Bay Area agencies and community organizations to help residents respond to natural disasters more efficiently.
Led by CEE Professor Kenichi Soga, the researchers will use the grant to create an interdisciplinary framework simulating wildfire evacuation methods in Bay Area communities, Marin County, and the city of Oakland in Alameda County.
"We need to think about the interactions of decision-making, communications between organizations and the public, and traffic patterns during a wildfire so we can understand what the issues are and how we can improve evacuations in the future," said Soga, director of the UC Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure, a CITRIS principal investigator (PI) and a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Check out the full CITRIS news article here to learn more about Soga's research.