Spring 2022 – CREATE News and Updates

Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergencies

Friends of CREATE,

As we approach the end of our academic year, I am writing to relay some of CREATE’s accomplishments over the last few months. Our work has included important studies, publications and presentations that demonstrate CREATE’s contributions to homeland security.  We are executing on major projects supported by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and we continue to pursue new opportunities that contribute to the understanding of catastrophic risks, their consequences and the interventions that might make our nation safer.  CREATE also welcomed a new research fellow. 

I, along with the entire center, thank the Department of Homeland Security, Price School of Public Policy and Viterbi School of Engineering for their ongoing support, which makes it possible for us to continue our important work.  

Dan Wei and co-authors published “Socioeconomic Impacts of Resilience to Seaport and Highway Transportation Network Disruption” in Transportation Research Part D. The paper analyzes the effects of seaport and associated transportation network disruptions. Since such disruptions can affect people in a region unequally, the model is constructed to analyze both aggregate economic impacts and impacts across socioeconomic groups.  

Adam Rose published “Behavioral Economic Consequences of Disasters: A Basis for Inclusion in Benefit–Cost Analysis” in Economics of Disasters and Climate Change.  The purpose of the paper was to develop an analytical framework for estimating the behavioral effects of disasters and their economic consequences.

Noah Dormady (External Research Fellow) and co-authors published “The Cost-effectiveness of Economic Resilience” in the International Journal of Production Economics. The paper develops a theoretical approach for evaluating economic resilience in the context of a formal economic production theory, and then empirically measures those theoretical relationships using econometric analysis of the primary survey data.

Research by Adam Rose, Terrie Walmsley, Richard John, Dan Wei, Jakub Hlávka and Juan Machado on the economic consequences of COVID-19 was reported in the media: “How has COVID-19 Impacted our Economy?" (News-Medical.net [UK], January 14, 2022).

Gilberto Montibeller (External Senior Research Fellow) has led a project for the World Health Organization on the optimization of track and trace teams against health threats.  A prototype optimization model has been developed by the research team during the project, and this model is currently being refined for possible future pilot trials in partnership with WHO.

Adam Rose and co-authors published “Economic Impacts of Spillover Effects of Terrorism Countermeasures at Public Assembly Sites” in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.  The paper emanated from a CREATE study that showed that Americans were more inclined to attend events at arenas and convention centers with counterterrorism or anti-crime security measures despite sacrificing convenience and privacy.

Lucio Soibelman

Erroll Southers

Sam Chatterjee

Adam Rose

CREATE welcomed Lucio Soibelman as a new Senior Research Fellow. Soibelman is the Fred Champion Estate Chair in Engineering and a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at USC Viterbi, and adds to CREATE’s expertise in infrastructure resilience and risk assessment.

Erroll Southers has been elevated to an important new position at USC: Associate Senior Vice President of Safety & Risk Assurance. Erroll now has broad responsibility for safety programs throughout the university.

Sam Chatterjee, a CREATE External Fellow based at PNNL and Northeastern University, was selected to lead a DHS-CISA multi-laboratory subgroup on risk architecture analytic development.

Adam Rose was appointed as a member of a National Academies of Science and Engineering Hazard Mitigation and Resilience Applied Research Committee. He helped organize and spoke at the first of two workshops organized by the Committee (on Equitable and Resilient Infrastructure Investment) and will be a co-author of its forthcoming report.

Jeremy Barajas, a student of CREATE Associate Director Richard John, received the prestigious USC Discovery Scholars award, which honors undergraduate students who excel in the classroom while demonstrating the ability to create exceptional new scholarship or artistic works. Jeremy’s thesis, titled “Developing a Measure of Truth Discernment Ability Using Pandemic Information,” was also awarded 1st Prize at the USC Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work in the Social Sciences category.

Randolph Hall presented CREATE’s work at the INFORMS Business Analytics conference, in his invited presentation “Mitigation, Resilience and Equity: Analyzing and Responding to Homeland Security Threats.”  Hall also taught a special course for security professionals on “Open Innovation” within the joint Price/Viterbi program in Global Space and Defense, and helped organize “HELIOS,” a new consortium of 65 universities focused on advancing open scholarship.  HELIOS is the first initiative of its type that directly engages university presidents in implementing new models for conducting research.  

Richard John, Katie Byrd, and Jeremy Barajas presented their findings on accuracy and bias in distinguishing true and false information about the COVID-19 pandemic. The Society for Risk Analysis 2021 conference on Risk Science and the Policy Interface session was titled “Analyzing Pandemic Risk Perception and Avoidance Behavior.” 

Adam Rose was a presenter at a Society for Risk Analysis webinar on new developments in resilience research. Rose summarized recent advances in quantifying resilience of individual businesses and supply chains, including the development of a decision-support tool called the Business Resilience Calculator (BRC).

Senior External Research Fellow Scott Farrow presented his DHS/CREATE-funded work in a session titled “Evaluating Technological Alternatives for U.S. Border Management,” on the net benefits and residual costs of U.S. border management at the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis 2022 Annual Conference and the Society for Risk Analysis 2021 conference on Risk Science and the Policy Interface.

Upcoming: On May 24 at 11:00 am, CREATE External Senior Research Fellow Ilan Noy will present “The Costs of Extreme Weather Events Caused by Climate Change” at Ralph and Goldy Lewis Hall (RGL 103) at USC. Please contact CREATE if you wish to attend.

At the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergencies, we pursue an all-hazards approach to understanding how to effectively make the nation safer.  Our work is deep, diverse and timely.  Our studies address supply chain resilience, optimized vaccine allocation during pandemics, management and cost/benefit analysis of technology transfer to advance security, economic consequences of disasters and risk assessment for extreme weather events, to name just a few topics.  

CREATE is a national resource for rigorous and objective analysis. We welcome new collaborations, participants and ideas for research that make our nation safer against risks of catastrophic events.  Please send your thoughts.

Randy Hall
Director, CREATE