Tracy Kijewski-Correa

Biography & Research

Tracy Kijewski-Correa is the William J. Pulte Director of the Pulte Institute for Global Development in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, where she also served as the founding co-Director of the School’s Integration Lab (i-Lab).

As a professor of civil engineering and global affairs, jointly appointed in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences, she is a faculty fellow at a number of Notre Dame institutes including the Keough School's Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate and the Environmental Change Initiative. She also serves on the advisory council of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers and on the board of the Applied Technology Council.

Kijewski-Correa's research is dedicated to enhancing the resilience and sustainability of hazard-exposed communities, with an emphasis on conceiving holistic responses to infrastructure vulnerabilities and tools that support science-informed decision making by diverse stakeholders. She currently serves as the inaugural director of the National Science Foundation’s Structural Extreme Event Reconnaissance (StEER) network, assessing the impacts of dozens of disasters globally using novel sensing modalities and advances in data science. This includes advancing localized assessment efforts in Haiti following the 2021 Nippes Earthquake.

Leveraging these and other open data sources, she is similarly leading the development of regional simulation tools for hurricane risk assessment through the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Computational Simulation Center (SimCenter). Her work further explores how to effectively integrate field observations, simulations and experiments to advance stakeholder-engaged research, policy and practice as a co-investigator in the design of a National Full-Scale Testing Infrastructure for Community Hardening in Extreme Wind, Surge, and Wave Events (NICHE), a major research infrastructure to experimentally simulate the impacts of climatological hazards and adaptation solutions for frontline communities.

This work complements Kijewski-Correa's ongoing interdisciplinary research on self-recovery after major disasters and uptake of climate-adaptive measures in communities around the world. Her expertise in housing vulnerability and recovery was informed by longitudinal studies after a number of major disasters including the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami in Thailand and Indonesia, the 2010 and 2021 Earthquakes in Haiti, Hurricane Matthew (also in Haiti), and Hurricane Laura (2020) in Louisiana. Her research on these events has informed both policy and practice, most notably through the housing model deployed in Haiti through her Engineering2Empower initiative, as well as her service on the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine consensus study on Compounding Disasters in Gulf Coast Communities, 2020-2021.

Kijewski-Correa's contributions have been recognized by awards from the American Society of Civil Engineering, the American Political Science Association, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the International Association for Wind Engineering and the American Association for Wind Engineering. Kijewski-Correa is formally trained as a civil engineer with a specialization in structural engineering, earning her bachelor of science, master of science, and Ph.D. from Notre Dame.

Recognitions and Awards

• Michael Gaus Distinguished Service Award, American Association for Wind Engineering
• Provost's All-Faculty Team (2023)

Recent Work

• "Before and after disaster: homeowner protective actions in a changing climate" (International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction)
• "Economic incentives for coastal homeowner adaptation to climate change" (Climate Policy)

News & Media

• "Fr. Ted Said: Being a Bridge-Builder" (ThinkND)
• "Homes are increasingly at risk from floods. Elevation can help" (NPR)
• "Protective actions need regulatory support to fully defend homeowners and coastal communities, study finds"
• "Is it time for Anderson Cooper and other reporters to come in from the hurricanes? "(CBC)
• "ND Expert: Hurricanes like Milton, Helene are the new normal"
• "Climate-proofing can lower your bills. Why people still aren’t doing it" (Policygenius)
• "A California-style approach could save Florida homes during hurricanes" (Newsweek)
• "The US isn’t ready for stronger hurricanes, experts say. How structures are built could help" (USA Today)
• "Notre Dame engineers work to build climate-resilient homes"
• "In race against hurricane season, engineers launch survey to study incentives for climate-resilient homes" (Notre Dame News)