Kansas Graduate Students Honored for Excellence in Resilience Research

Two graduate students—Adithya Melagoda of Wichita State University and Ali Khaleghinia of the University of Kansas—were recognized for their outstanding research posters at the 2026 ARISE Annual Symposium.

In recognition of their work, each student received a travel award valued at up to $1,500. These awards are designed to fuel professional development by supporting attendance at domestic conferences related to the ARISE project, covering essential expenses including airfare, lodging, and registration.

Winning Poster Abstracts

Equity-Aware Load Prioritization and Planning Strategies to Improve Power System Resilience During HILF Events
Adithya Melagoda and Visvakumar Aravinthan
aumelagoda@shockers.wichita.edu

Power systems and other interdependent infrastructures are increasingly exposed to high impact low frequency (HILF) events, which can cause severe generation inadequacy and load curtailments that disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. To address this challenge, this work proposes an equity-aware optimal restoration and planning strategy applicable to any power network during an HILF event. First, a load prioritization framework is developed that incorporates customer criticality and social equity. The framework first allocates power to critical loads and non-critical loads are ranked using their economic value, social equity and load criticality. Secondly, an equity-oriented optimal switch placement framework is proposed as a long-term planning strategy to reduce disparities in post-event distribution system restoration across vulnerable communities.

Libraries as Resilience Infrastructure: Reducing Heat-Related Mortality Across U.S. Counties

Ali Khaleghinia and Rachel Krause
a.khaleghinia@ku.edu

Extreme heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States, and vulnerability to extreme heat is amplified by physical infirmity, social inequality, and characteristics of the built environment. In the U.S., elderly, homeless, and Black populations are among those most at risk of heat-related mortality. U.S. municipalities often utilize short-term, formally designated cooling centers as interventions to mitigate risk, but these facilities can be difficult to access and are often underused. This study evaluates whether public libraries, free, familiar, climate-controlled spaces with predictable hours, function as everyday “cooling infrastructure” that reduces heat-related mortality. We assemble a national county-level panel covering 3,009 U.S. counties from 2018–2023 (17,918 county–year observations), linking heat deaths from CDC WONDER with facility-level Public Libraries Survey data. We operationalize library availability as total library square footage multiplied by annual operating hours, aggregated to the county, and estimate a correlated random effects model, controlling for demographic vulnerability, socioeconomic capacity, political context, and annual extreme-heat exposure. Results indicate that greater library availability is significantly associated with fewer heat-related deaths. Substantively, increasing library availability by the equivalent of keeping 100,000 square feet open for an additional 1,000 hours annually is associated with approximately 35.5 fewer heat deaths per year nationwide, about a 3.7% reduction relative to the 2018–2023 annual average. Taken together, the findings support framing public libraries as scalable heat-adaptation assets and highlight operational levers through which local and state policy can strengthen heat adaptation while reducing reliance on ad hoc emergency measures.