Natural Hazards / Disaster Research

From sending researchers to the scene of hurricanes and terrorist attacks to providing advice on how to mitigate damage from floods and earthquakes, CU-Boulder is home to the nation's leading repository of knowledge on human behavior in disasters. Since 1976, the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center has served as a clearinghouse providing information on disasters of all types.

The center is dedicated to advancing the nation's understanding of the social aspects of hazards and disasters and increasingly is working on the effects of large-scale terrorist attacks. In terms of physical impacts and the ways in which people and organizations respond, such attacks have a great deal in common with natural disasters such as great earthquakes and hurricanes.

"One of the goals of the center is to ensure that lessons learned from more than five decades of research on natural disasters and other extreme events are applied to the management of emerging terrorism-related threats," said center Director Kathleen Tierney, who is a professor of sociology.

The center is part of CU-Boulder's Institute of Behavioral Science and is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, other federal agencies and private-sector funders. Center personnel include faculty, professional staff and graduate and undergraduate students.

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