9:00 - 09:10
[Speaker Name]
09:10 - 09:40
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Chao Yuan, Presidential Young Professor and the founder and Principal Investigator of Urban Climate Design Lab, National University of Singapore.
09:40 - 10:10
Speaker: Jill Gambill, Executive Director and Senior Research Associate, Coastal Equity and Resilience Hub in the Institute of People and Technology (IPaT), Georgia Institute of Technology
Break 10:10 - 10:20
10:20 - 11:20
Speaker 1: “Systems that Amplify”, Jennifer Pazour, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the James M Tien `66 Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
Speaker 2: “Urban Renewable Management through Local Community-based Energy Exchange Networks”, Fengqi (Frank) Li, Assistant Professor, Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
Description: Underutilized resources exist all around us in cities. When at a stoplight, notice the empty seats and cargo spaces in the vehicles around you. Consider the urban food waste that ends up in landfills but has the potential to be upcycled into biobased products that expand the biomass value chain. To harness these and other underutilized resources, organizations need to think differently about how resources are acquired, managed, and allocated to fulfill requests. This session will explore new approaches to enable resource sharing and collaboration, allowing for more sustainable use and movement of urban resources.
11:20 - 12:20
Speaker 1: Peter A. Adriaens, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Center and Master of Engineering program in Smart Infrastructure Finance, University of Michigan.
Speaker 2: to be added
Description: This session explores the critical role of climate finance methods in evaluating and guiding investment strategies for infrastructure development under climate risk. Despite increasing recognition of the need for adaptation, significant finance gaps persist for critical infrastructure, driven by high upfront costs, long asset lifetimes, deep uncertainty, and the difficulty of monetizing resilience benefits. The session focuses on how financial and economic assessment tools can be designed to account for long-term resilience, uncertainty, and systemic risk, including interdependent and cascading effects across multiple infrastructure systems and economic sectors. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: climate-informed cost–benefit analysis; resilience and adaptation finance metrics; valuation of avoided losses and co-benefits; financing mechanisms for resilient infrastructure; and approaches for capturing cross-sectoral interdependencies and cascading impacts in investment decision-making.
Lunch Break 12:20 - 1:10
1:10 - 2:10
Introduction (Speaker: Jennifer Hirsch)
Framing - Overview of framework and how it differs from traditional approaches to resilience hubs (Speaker: Daniel Kilpatrick)
Case Study 1 - VICARS, Atlanta (Speaker: Erica Holloman-Hill)
Case Study 2 - Hampton Roads (Speaker: Freddie Stevens)
Case Study 3 - Paradise Center, Atlanta (Speaker: Garry Harris)
Perspective - RHubs relationship to EJ Strong (Speaker: Keisha Long)
Keynote Listeners - Returning to the framework & Top 10 Takeaways (Speaker: Jung-Ho Lewe, and Allen Hyde)
Q&A (host: Jennifer Hirsch)
Break 2:10 - 2:20
2:20 - 3:20
Speaker 1: Sharad Goel, Professor, Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
Speaker 2: Nikhil Garg, Assistant Professor, Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE), Cornell Tech.
Description: cities increasingly rely on predictive algorithms to govern core public institutions, such as child welfare agencies, courts, hospitals, and schools. These systems help determine who is screened for services, released from custody, or enrolled in care. This session asks a question with significant implications for urban resilience: when institutions delegate consequential decisions to risk scores, do they become more capable of serving populations fairly and maintaining public trust, or do they instead reproduce and amplify existing vulnerabilities? Our premise is that the answer lies not in the technology itself, but in the choices embedded in its design. What outcomes are predicted? Against what benchmarks are systems evaluated? Whose outcomes count? Predictive models trained on historical decisions measure the world as it was administered, not necessarily the world policymakers hope to create. These are normative choices with population-level consequences, not merely technical details. Bringing together application-oriented research across diverse institutional domains, the session reframes resilience as a capacity that cities actively build rather than passively inherit. Resilient institutions are those that can integrate new predictive tools while rigorously assessing their causal and distributional effects, identifying unintended consequences, and redesigning systems to sustain equity, legitimacy, and public trust.
3:20 - 4:20
Speaker 1: Linyin Cheng, Associate Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Arkansas.
Speaker 2: Patrick Kastner, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, and Director of the Sustainable Urban Systems Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Speaker 3: Yisha Xiang, Associate Professor, Scott T. Poage Faculty Fellow, Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Houston.
Speaker 4: Xiao Liu, David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), and Associate Director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), Georgia Institute of Technology.
4:20 -