We encourage our students to gain multi-disciplinary experience and training to support the field of urban resilience. Leveraging the strength of the Urban Resilience Initiative faculty and others at Stanford, we support students to gain in-depth expertise in a discipline relevant to the urban resilience field (earth-sciences, engineering, statistics, etc), a breadth of knowledge covering a multi-disciplinary curricula, research experience aimed at pushing the boundary of current knowledge while answering to real-world needs.
If you are interested, please contact one of our faculty for guidance on courses. You will find below a non-exhaustive list of courses supporting the skillset for resilience research and practice.
Courses
CEE 265F: Environmental Governance and Climate Resilience (POLISCI 227B, PUBLPOL 265F)
Adaptation to climate change will not only require new infrastructure and policies, but it will also challenge our local, state and national governments to collaborate across jurisdictional lines in ways that include many different types of private and nonprofit organizations and individual actors. The course explores what it means for communities to be resilient and how they can reach that goal in an equitable and effective way. Using wildfires in California as a case study, the course assesses specific strategies, such as controlled burns and building codes, and a range of planning and policy measures that can be used to enhance climate resilience. In addition, it considers how climate change and development of forested exurban areas (among other factors) have influenced the size and severity of wildfires. The course also examines the obstacles communities face in selecting and implementing adaptation measures (e.g., resource constraints, incentives to develop in forested areas, inadequate policy enforcement, and weak inter-agency coordination). Officials from various Bay Area organizations contribute to aspects of the course; and students will present final papers to local government offcials.
CEE 296: Regional Seismic Risk Analysis and Risk Management
This course is aimed at students who are interested in rigorous modeling of earthquake impacts at regional scale and data-driven design of risk management strategies. The first half of the course will focus on building computational tools for simulation of earthquake shaking, damage to buildings and infrastructure, and the resulting social and economic losses. The second half of the course will explore how impact modeling relates to disaster recovery policy, infrastructure investment planning, and other aspects of disaster risk management. The class will include guest speakers from government institutions, private sector, and academia who work at the intersection of risk modeling and planning/policy.
CEE 209S: Disaster Resilience Seminar
This seminar will present topics associated with quantifying, communicating and improving the resilience of urban areas to disasters. Speakers from a range of disciplines will present current research, application, and thinking on innovations, current best practices and the future of disaster resilience. Guest speakers, supplemental reading, and group discussion will be utilized to teach about the complex nature of natural disasters, the impacts on different regions, and the multi-disciplinary/multi-cultural ways of thinking to prepare communities.
ME 310A: Global Engineering Design Thinking, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
The ME310ABC sequence immerses students in a real-world, globally distributed engineering design experience in the spirit of a Silicon Valley start-up teaching them to manage the chaos and ambiguity inherent in professional design .nTeams of 3-4 Stanford graduate students partner with a similar team at an international university to work on industry-funded design challenges to deliver breakthrough innovation prototypes ( http://expe.stanford.edu). Design challenges are typically at the HUMAN INTERFACE to Robots, AI, Internet of Things, Autonomous vehicles, and Smart Cities. In ME310A you will learn HUMAN-CENTRIC Design-Thinking with the guidance of a teaching team that includesn3 faculty, expert industry coaches, and academic staff. Your team will explore the problem & solutions spaces using strategic-foresight, design thinking, team-dynamics-management, rapid prototyping, and human-centric problem reframing.