ARISE Webinar Series

Welcome to our webinar series! As part of the ARISE project, these webinars feature esteemed scientists and engineers from Kansas and beyond to promote learning about resilient infrastructure systems.

January 21, 2026

3:30 -4:30
Register for Zoom Link

Title: Resilience Intelligence for Natural Hazards: AI-Enabled, Community-Centric Planning Under Uncertainty

Speaker: Dr. Milad Roohi, Assistant Professor; Director of Smart Resilient Infrastructure and Urban Systems (SiRIUS) Lab; College of Engineering Teaching Fellow at the Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

Abstract: Communities across the United States face compounding risks from diverse natural hazards, ranging from severe convective storms and flooding to cascading failures across interdependent infrastructure systems that directly affect public safety, economic stability, and community recovery. Addressing these challenges requires planning frameworks that not only simulate complex physical risks, but also democratize access to advanced, decision-relevant analytics for community officials and stakeholders across the rural–urban continuum. This seminar introduces a vision for Resilience Intelligence: a framework that integrates physics-based modeling, probabilistic inference, and next-generation cyberinfrastructure to support AI-enabled decision-making for communities facing multi-hazard uncertainty. This approach enables the testing of policy alternatives and cost–benefit tradeoffs (such as infrastructure hardening, recovery prioritization, and resilience investments), leading to more informed and transparent decisions. Central to this vision is the development of flexible modeling architectures and automated workflows that integrate multidisciplinary data, models, and uncertainty quantification to capture the multidimensional interdependencies and vulnerability of infrastructure, energy, and social systems. The presentation addresses critical challenges in data availability, model development, and validation, demonstrating how probabilistic and AI methods can generate reliable and actionable insights, even in sparse pre- and post-disaster data environments. The versatility of this approach is demonstrated through multi-scalar case studies of interdependent community systems across the Midwest and the broader United States. The seminar concludes by outlining the critical role of collaborative ecosystems, highlighting emerging multi-sector partnerships spanning academia, local communities, and industry, and illustrating a scalable roadmap for translating advanced cyberinfrastructure into tangible, community-centered resilience outcomes. 

About the speaker: Dr. Milad Roohi is an Assistant Professor in the Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), where he directs the Smart Resilient Infrastructure and Urban Systems (SiRIUS) Lab. His research investigates the interplay between multi-disciplinary data, algorithms, and computational models to improve the monitoring and resilience of interconnected civil infrastructure against natural hazards. Before joining UNL, Dr. Roohi served as a Senior Scientist at Aon Impact Forecasting’s Catastrophe Modeling R&D Center of Excellence, where he developed risk models for the reinsurance industry. He also completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the NIST Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning at Colorado State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Vermont. Dr. Roohi’s work has been funded by the NSF, NIST, NASA EPSCoR, HUD, and the Nebraska Department of Transportation. He actively contributes to national and international technical committees, including serving as Chair of the ASCE Objective Resilience Committee and a member of the IABSE Task Group on Design Requirements for Infrastructure Resilience.

Past Webinars

DEC 9, 2025 - "Enhanced State of Health assessment of lithium-ion batteries for resilient infrastructure systems." Davi Soares, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wichita State University 

NOV 19, 2025 - "Community Resilience and Resilience Equity In Hazard-Prone Areas." Seth Guikema, Professor Civil and Environmental Engineering, Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan

OCT 15, 2025 - "The EFC: Translating Academics to Action." Jeff Severin, Senior Program Manager, Environmental Finance Center, Wichita State University

FEB 27, 2025 - "Hazard Mitigation Planning and Implementation: Where the Rubber Meets the Road," Prof. Wie Yusuf, Old Dominion University

DEC 5, 2024 – “Have you thought of everything? Minimize the impact of a changing climate through planning” Amanda Sharma, Wichita State University.

OCT 25, 2024 – “Accelerating Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships,” by Danielle Sumy about TIP Directorate, National Science Foundation.

JAN 29, 2024 - “Impact of severe weather events on traffic and mobility patterns in Kansas,” by Ehsan Salari, associate professor at Wichita State University.

NOV 13, 2023 - “Stories from the Field: An Ethical Toolkit for Long-Term Disaster Research,” by Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center and professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

SEP 23, 2023 - “Emergency Management at the Local Level,” by Hannes Zacharias, Professor of Practice, University of Kansas.

MAR 8, 2023 - “Community Capitals for ARISE” by Dr. Cornelia Flora, Kansas State University.

FEB 1, 2023 - “Virtual Testbeds for Community Resilience Analysis” by Dr. Amin Enderami, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Kansas.