Purdue Systems Collaboratory names fellows

The Purdue Systems Collaboratory has selected three PhD students for its new Systems Fellows Program. The assistantship is meant to support outstanding graduate students who conduct research addressing a systems problem or advancing systems science.

The three fellows represent different systems interests and bring together expertise from the colleges of Liberal Arts, Engineering, Agriculture, and Health and Human Sciences. The 2018 fellows are:

Takahiro Yabe, Lyles School of Civil Engineering

* Advisors: Satish Ukkusuri, professor of civil engineering, and Seungyoon Lee, associate professor of communication

* Project title: A Network-of-Networks Approach to Model the Disaster Resilience of Urban Socio-Physical Systems

* Project and research interests: Cities are highly complex systems that are composed of interdependent socio-physical networks with dynamic and often latent connections between heterogeneous nodes. The complexity is recently increasing with stronger functional and structural coupling between systems, which is increasing cities' vulnerability to disasters in unforeseen ways. Current research on urban resilience have largely neglected the dynamic interdependencies between social and physical systems and are limited to analyses of few disaster cases. To overcome such limitations, the team takes a network-of-networks approach to understand the mechanisms that lead to the diversity in resilience across cities backed by large-scale data of human mobility and infrastructure failures collected from various disasters across cities. Findings will be applied to develop state-of-the-art decision support tools that could assist decision makers by predicting the recovery dynamics of cities after disasters.

Nagisa Ishinabe, Department of Political Science

* Advisors: David Johnson, assistant professor of industrial engineering and political science; Dominique van der Mensbrugghe, research professor of agricultural economics and director of the Center for Global Trade Analysis; and McKenzie Johnson, assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

* Project title: Climate Change, Migration and Conflict

* Project and research interests: Ishinabe’s project focuses on climate change and the creation of solution-oriented globally consistent and comprehensive research outputs for a wide range of audience. Efforts have been placed on producing practical metrics for various stakeholders, so that people with different backgrounds and objectives can take actions using their own leverage points. Ishinabe's current research examines climate impacts on international migration and conflicts. She is estimating migration flows and identifying conflict hotspots for the international community to create policies and institutions so that future catastrophic disasters will be minimized. Her previous research includes marginal abatement cost of carbon calculation covering over 1,000 companies for business leaders to assess and adjust their strategies and for governments to set appropriate carbon policies. Her other interests include climate negotiations and sustainable development.

Emiliano López Barrera, Department of Agricultural Economics

* Advisors: Gerald Shively, professor of agricultural economics; Thomas Hertel, Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Economics; and Nilupa Gunaratna, assistant professor of nutrition science

* Project title: Health and Environmental Implications of the Nutrition “Double Burden”

* Project and research interests: López Barrera is currently focusing on the international agricultural trade and international development specialty areas. He is analyzing the interactions of the land and agriculture system with the global food demand. In his view, few problems could be more pertinent to global affairs than those posed by the contemporary linkages between human diets, health and environmental quality. A growing global population combined with changes in consumption patterns are placing unprecedented levels of stress on the planet’s scarce natural resources. This process is leading to the degradation of land, water and biodiversity, while also increasing greenhouse gases emissions on a global scale. Within this context, meeting the nutritional requirements for the world’s population while ensuring environmental sustainability will continue to be a major challenge for humanity over the coming decades. López Barrera hopes that his research will shed some light on these intricate matters and make a significant contribution to the cause.

The three selected fellows will present their proposed research projects in October 2018 as part of a PSC event to launch the Systems Fellows Program. Additional information about the PSC event will be available as details are finalized.

The Purdue Systems Collaboratory is an interdisciplinary program at Purdue that engages faculty and students from across campus.

For more information, contact Boshra Afra, research and education director for the Purdue Systems Collaboratory, at afra@purdue.edu.