Mo Research Group

The Mo research group conducts stakeholder-engaged, interdisciplinary research towards sustainable, resilient, and smart communities. Sustainability encompasses efficient supply, use, and disposal/recycling of resources and services with minimized adverse human health and environmental impacts, through inclusive and equitable governance that promotes livability and social justice. Resilience describes a community’s capability to maintain or quickly return to the desired functions of its human and physical systems under external disturbances. Smart refers to the use of various human and physical system data to improve the operation and management of community functions across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Working at the intersection of human, infrastructure, and natural systems, our group uses computational methods (e.g., system dynamics modeling, life cycle assessment, agent-based modeling, network analysis, machine learning) to capture the interactions within and across different types of physical and human systems and to predict their short- and long-term behaviors under perturbations. These are combined with social sciences methods (e.g., serious gaming, crowdsourcing, participatory modeling, interviews) to understand the processes and constraints of decision-making and coordination at different levels to strengthen the linkage between knowledge and actions. Collectively, our group seeks to address current and emerging challenges related to disaster response and planning, climate resilience, public health and critical infrastructure protection, and social justice.