Federal Grant Award Summary

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation awarded $549,909 to the University of Delaware under CFDA 47.041 (Engineering) on September 1, 2026, for a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project titled "AI-Driven Role-Aware Modeling of Cascading Disaster Impacts in Sociotechnical Systems." The project will deliver three primary research products over the five-year period through August 31, 2031: (1) a role-aware adaptation model integrating behavioral theories with empirical disaster data to characterize how individuals adapt across multiple social roles during infrastructure disruptions; (2) a predictive modeling platform capturing role-based adaptation at individual and population scales with bias auditing capabilities for vulnerable subgroups; and (3) a large language model (LLM)-enabled generative agent-based modeling platform that bidirectionally couples human adaptive behavior with infrastructure performance through service demand, workforce participation, and behavioral cascade feedback mechanisms.

The framework advances artificial intelligence methods designed to generalize across hazards and geographic regions without requiring extensive localized data collection, providing particular value to resource-constrained and vulnerable communities. These deliverables will provide emergency managers, community planners, and policymakers with analytical capacity to anticipate cascading disaster impacts across populations and identify evidence-based recovery strategies that account for how individual role-based decisions ripple through communities during and after infrastructure failures.