8:30
9:00 - 09:10
Dr. Beril Toktay, Regents' Professor, Brady Family Chairholder in the Scheller College of Business, and Executive Director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, Georgia Institute of Technology. Board of Directors, New York Climate Exchange
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
Speakers:
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
Andel Koester, Director of Community Initiatives
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: Amy Campbell, Columbia alumna, Fulbright Scholar, British Red Cross disaster finance consultant, PhD candidate climate disaster economics
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
Speakers: Members of the "Community-University Partnerships Network for Southeast Resilience Hubs"
Garry Harris, Sustainability Solutions Group and Institute
Jennifer Hirsch, Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE), Georgia Institute of Technology
Dan Kilpatrick, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, University of South Carolina
Jung-Ho Lewe, School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Keisha Long, South Carolina Public Health Association
Beth Remmes, Georgia Interfaith Power and Light
Fred Stevens, ReGen Community Advisory
Description: In this session, members of a new community-university collaboration network - "Community-University Partnerships Network for Southeast Resilience Hubs" - currently housed at Georgia Tech, share their emerging goals for the network; a framework-in-development for supporting community-led resilience hubs through partnerships with universities; and case studies of the framework in action in Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. The framework grounds resilience and resilient technologies in local values and community goals and visions for a thriving future.
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 -