A team of six Prairie View A&M University faculty including Ali Fares, Camille Gibson, Suxia Cui, Ripendra Awal, Hamideh Habibi, and Louis Ngamassi attended a workshop on Design Thinking for Resilience at Stanford University (May 2-3, 2019). The event was part of a continued multi-institution collaboration initiative on Disaster Resilience. In addition to the PVAMU and Stanford teams, participants came from the University of California-Berkley, Northeastern University, and several technology companies in the Bay area, including Facebook and Amazon. There were also representatives from the Cities of San Francisco and Oakland.
The goal of the two-day event was to clearly define the importance of data for resilience, social impact, and identify how each academic partner and organization may contribute to a research agenda on data for resilience. Specifically, the workshop sought to (i) identify research themes, data sources, and stakeholders (ii) build team cohesion to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration between meeting participants, and (iii) refine and convey the research mission to stakeholder groups and participants from the technology industry.
The PVAMU team participated very actively in the workshop, including a presentation given by Camille Gibson on Community Engagement. The presentation described the importance of including the community in efforts to build disaster resilience and how to do it effectively. The “lessons learned” in this regard come from her work as the Director of a certificate program in Homeland Security and Emergency Management housed in the College of Juvenile Justice & Psychology at Prairie View.