NSF CAREER award advances participatory stormwater resilience

Dr. Yao Hu, principal investigator of the Water Intelligence Lab at the University of Delaware, has received a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER award for “CAREER: Advancing a Participatory Framework for Decentralized Stormwater Management.”

The project will develop an AI/ML-accelerated, stakeholder-informed socio-hydrologic framework for evaluating decentralized gray-and-green stormwater solutions under compound rainfall, tidal, and groundwater hazards. It combines new resilience and service-reliability metrics, stakeholder surveys and behavioral choice experiments, agent-based modeling and optimization, and a participatory digital-twin testbed.

The project’s education and workforce-development activities will train students and practitioners in hydrologic modeling, data science, responsible use of AI/ML, digital twins, and community-informed infrastructure planning.

We gratefully acknowledge support from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI), through the Infrastructure Systems and People (ISP) program. Learn more on the official NSF award page.