The Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is pleased to announce that they have hired Chittayong (Jao) Surakitbanham as Executive Director.
Jao’s PhD was in Industrial Engineering, and his background is in human factors, disaster management and incentive design. Since his PhD he has been working at a DHS center focused on visualization of information in crisis environments. He has a passion for building centers and combining research with outreach, and is excited to help facilitate new research connections at Stanford and raise the international profile of SURI.
The Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative is focused on research and design of technologies to improve the resilience of communities to natural disasters. Housed in the Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, the initiative is focused on tackling one of the major global challenges of the next century: ensuring that our human environments–increasingly urban, complex, interconnected–cope with and thrive in the face of natural perils. An engaged group of Stanford faculty and students are participating in this effort, creating an exciting opportunity for new initiatives.
