Engineer Tracy Kijewski-Correa has been doing post-disaster reconnaissance missions since 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami. On today’s episode, host Dan Zehner talks with Kijewski-Correa about assessing structural damage and the difficulty of rebuilding communities hit by a natural disaster. At Notre Dame, Kijewski-Correa holds a dual position in engineering and global affairs, the first engineer there to hold such a joint appointment. With her engineering background, she studies how political, socio-economic, religious and cultural norms come into play when making public policy decisions – including preparing for disasters and re-building after one. She cites the example of Haiti, where seven years after a major earthquake the country is still not returned to normal. Thanks to NGOs and others, there are new materials and skill sets to build resilient houses in Haiti, but because people do not have access to mortgages, many Haitians are still in shelters, waiting for financing to access those new homes. She explains that the engineering world lacks proper pipelines for linking fundamental research, such as post-disaster assessment, to concrete advancements in building codes, or practical advocacy programs. What holds back progress, she says, is that different funding agencies have differing priorities and timelines – making it hard to link the projects and complete the work necessary. After Hurricane Sandy, there was a remarkable coordination of NSF RAPID funding, which documented the damage, sustained funding from Army Corps of Engineers, to develop the coastal hazard simulation tool to map and recommend structural changes, and then funding from the state of New Jersey, which was necessary to implement the changes. It was a rare example of early seed funding, linked to translational funding down a pipeline that led to successfully rebuilding the area. Dual appointment engineers are pioneers, she says. You have to have an understanding of social constructs – if you want stuff to really happen. Academia traditionally does not focus on solving real problems, she explains. With her dual appointment, she tries to push the traditional research/education model to do more translational work. For most engineers, translational work is like a “night job,” work done on weekends and evenings. During the day, engineers do traditional, NSF-funded research, work that leads to publishing. Work such as post-earthquake reconnaissance or community-building, has to be done in an academic’s free time. And it takes years to make a difference. She’s grateful that Notre Dame recognizes the importance of having engineers with a dual focus. She credits it small size and its religious mission. Kijewski-Correa details the problems in Haiti, starting with difficulty reaching the cities after the 2010 earthquake. Hurricane Matthew in 2016 made the situation even worse. It was a struggle to move from reconnaissance to rebuilding. When a major earthquake struck Chile in 2016, she says that NGOs and funding agencies left Haiti for Chile, calculating they could be of more use in a country with an infrastructure similar to one many Western cities. Kijewski and her team are the only NGOs working to rebuild in Haiti, currently.