Professor, Glenn Department of Civil Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences
Disasters And Hazards, Evacuation Modeling, Resilience, Transportation Systems
At A Glance
When a natural or man-made disaster strikes, do you need to evacuate? If so, how much time do you have? What should you take? Do you need to pick up family and friends? If so, how are you going to get to them, and then, to your destination? When can you return? Pamela Murray-Tuite explores how communities respond to disasters and the challenges of evacuation — from the timing of a warning to the infrastructure of the affected community, destination pathway and back again. She examines disasters and hazards, evacuation modeling, emergency response and resilience.
Bio
As a professor of civil engineering, Pamela Murray-Tuite investigates exposure and vulnerability to hazards, the ability to withstand hazards, the amount of time it takes for systems to degrade and the amount of time it takes to recover. Her expertise encompasses a deep understanding of emergency response and evacuation modeling and an examination of how communities can build resilience in the aftermath of such events, specializing in unusual conditions in the transportation network or system, including evacuation and network and risk analysis.
Murray-Tuite has been involved in more than 45 research projects sponsored by the Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, Virginia Center for Transportation Innovation and Research, National Institute of Health, Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, Virginia Tech Center for Community Sustainability and Resilience and university transportation centers, among others.
In collaboration, Murray-Tuite’s works include over 90 publications, two books and three book chapters, with numerous publications on hurricane evacuation modeling and transportation systems, along with “Changes to Bridge Flood Risk under Climate Change” in Journal of Hydrologic Engineering and “The Dynamic Nature of Risk Perceptions after a Fatal Transit Accident” in Risk Analysis; and others. She has served on several committees and boards, previously serving as the co-chair of the Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Disaster Response, Emergency Evacuations and Business Continuity.
Before joining Clemson University in August 2017 as an associate professor, Murray-Tuite served as an associate professor at Virginia Tech. Prior to teaching, she worked as a senior consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton, a global consulting firm that provides a broad range of services to various sectors, including government, military and commercial clients.
When we talk about resilience, we often think about it in three pieces. There is the ability to withstand the hazard itself. There’s the amount by which a system will degrade and then the amount of time that it would take to recover. So with communities, it’s even more complicated because we have to recognize that a community operates at the intersection of a natural, built and social environment. Even your decision of where to build the community affects your resilience; that includes your exposure and vulnerability to hazards, particularly, for example, if you build in a floodplain, you’re in danger of being flooded.
