Risk InSight

On this episode of Let's Talk Risk, Professor Jun Zhuang, the Morton C. Frank Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Buffalo, joins to talk misinformation on social media. Zhuang breaks down what misinformation on social media is and why it's important for us to think about.

Benjamin K. Sovacool, professor at Boston University, University of Sussex, and Aarhus University, joins the podcast to discuss his new research on climate geoengineering. Sovacool dives into the risk tradeoffs of carbon removal and solar radiation management. His research highlights different risks in the climate system, and the institutional, political, behavioral, social and cultural risks that accompany deployment of new technology. To close out the podcast, Sovacool shares the three policy implications from the study.

Dr. David Johnson, professor of industrial engineering with a joint appointment of political science at Purdue University, joins Let's Talk Risk to discuss his most recent work on the inequities and health impacts of flooding. States and communities struggle when thinking about how to better incorporate equity consideration into their planning process. To combat this, Johnson explains a new metric to evaluate projects that normalize the value of homes: treating all households the same. Instead of trying to prioritize projects based on protecting value, Johnson and his fellow researchers created an alternative metric that thinks about protecting households, irrespective of their value.

There are plenty of environmental issues plaguing the world today. Whether it's climate change, water shortage or waste, it always boils down to one thing: consumption patterns. Prerna Shah, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Buffalo, joins the podcast to share her and Dr. Janet Yang's research where they analyze whether communication can help dispel inaccurate beliefs on sustainable products and if it can drive people toward more positive behavior.

Nicole Jackson, Ph.D., of Sandia National Labs, joins the Let's Talk Risk podcast to talk about her work analyzing how extreme weather events and climate hazards impact physical infrastructures. Jackson shares her experiences on researching how long outages are and how many people were affected to get a sense of the duration of the event and the kind of magnitude of the event from a human perspective. This conversation covers how communities are equipped for extreme weather events, energy equity, resiliency of different countries, socio-economic factors, and more.

Jose Palma-Oliverira, professor at the University of Lisbon, joins the podcast to talk all things risk communication regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Oliverira discusses the importance of having a trusted communicator and understanding the audience's belief systems, the population's perception of the communicator, the contradiction between individual rationality and global rationality, and much more. Without this understanding, Oliverira notes that the communicator will lose their audience and explains how to avoid this.

Let's Talk Risk Podcast is happy to welcome back Ben Trump, a research social scientist at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center to talk about vaccine and booster shot rollout. Ben discusses the everchanging COVID climate including the vaccine for kids from ages 5-eleven, where the pandemic may be headed next, closing the equity gap, improving communication, and everything in between. Disclaimer: Opinions are the speakers' alone, and not representative of the US Government or any state government.

What does vaccination development look like from a risk-based perspective? Seth Guikema, Ph.D., University of Michigan, talks with Ben Trump, a member of the Army Corps of Engineers, about the complex process of COVID-19 vaccine development. Between accounting for technical science perspectives, considering various forms of regulatory approval, and addressing risk assessment-based challenges, parsing through the process for COVID-19 emergency use vaccination efforts can seem arduous. Disclaimer: Opinions are the speakers' alone, and not representative of the US Government or any state government.