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Dr. Rachel DavidsonCore Faculty Teaching Schedule Office Hours BioRachel Davidson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Delaware. After completing her B.S.E. from Princeton University and M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, she spent two years at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, then six years at Cornell University, both as an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering. Following a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University, she joined the faculty at the University of Delaware and the Disaster Research Center in 2007. Davidson conducts research on natural disaster risk modeling. Her work involves developing new engineering models to better characterize the impact of future natural disasters, and use that understanding to support decisions to help reduce future losses. It focuses particularly on lifelines (e.g., electric power, water supply) and risk from a regional perspective; on earthquakes and hurricanes. Problems in this field typically involve a great deal of uncertainty, a long time horizon, multiple and competing objectives, and sometimes numerous and conflicting constituencies. They are often spatial and dynamic, and the technical aspects must be understood in the social, economic, political, and cultural context in which they exist. In addittion she is a mentor for the NSF-funded project "Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards and Disaster Researchers" program Current Studies"DRU: Integrated Optimization of Evacuation and Mass Care Sheltering for Hurricanes" “Infrastructure Security and Emergency Preparedness" "Investment Planning for Regional Natural Disaster Mitigation" "Methods for Measuring, Monitoring and Evaluating Post-Disaster Recovery" "Modeling the Spread of Post-Earthquake Fires" Selected PublicationsLegg, M., Nozick, L., and Davidson, R. Optimizing the selection of hazard-consistent probabilistic scenarios for long-term regional hurricane loss estimation, Structural Safety, In press. Vaziri, P., Davidson, R., Nozick, L., and Hosseini, M. Resource allocation for regional earthquake risk mitigation: A case study of Tehran, Iran, Natural Hazards, In press. Tabucchi, T., Davidson, R., and Brink, S. Simulation of post-earthquake water supply system restoration.Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems, In press. Liu, H., Davidson, R., and Apanasovich, T. 2007. Spatial Generalized Linear Mixed Models of Electric Power Outages due to Hurricanes and Ice Storms. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, in press (available online). Liu, H., Davidson, R., and Apanasovich, T. Statistical forecasting of electric power restoration times in hurricanes and ice storms. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems 22(4), 2270-2279. Çağnan, Z., and Davidson, R. 2007. Discrete event simulation of the post-earthquake restoration process for electric power systems. International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management 7(8), 1138-1156. Xu, N., Davidson, R., Nozick, L., and Dodo, A. 2007. The risk-return tradeoff in optimizing regional earthquake mitigation investment. Structure and Infrastructure Engineering 3(2), 133-146. Jain, V., and Davidson, R. 2007. Application of a regional hurricane wind risk forecasting model for wood-frame houses. Risk Analysis 27(1), 45-58. Winner of Best Paper Award, Society for Risk Analysis. Jain, V., and Davidson, R. 2007. Forecasting changes in the hurricane wind vulnerability of a building inventory. Journal of Infrastructure Systems 13(1), 1-12. Dodo, A., Davidson, R., Xu, N., and Nozick, L. 2007. Application of regional earthquake mitigation optimization. Computers and Operations Research 34(8), 2478-2494. Çağnan, Z., Davidson, R., and Guikema, S. 2006. Post-earthquake restoration planning for Los Angeles electric power. Earthquake Spectra 22(3), 1-20. Liu, H., Davidson, R. Rosowsky, D. and Stedinger, J. 2005. Negative binomial regression of electric power outages in hurricanes. Journal of Infrastructure Systems 11(4), 258-267. Dodo, A., Xu, N. Davidson, R. and Nozick, L. 2005. Optimizing regional earthquake mitigation investment strategies. Earthquake Spectra 21(2), 305-327. |
