UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Rebecca Napolitano, assistant professor of architectural engineering at Penn State, has been awarded a five-year, $618,863 U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for her project, “Integrating Structural, Social, and Preservation Factors in Tornado Damage and Recover Models.”
Napolitano discussed her goals for the project, which focuses on predicting natural disaster damage and recovery for communities with historic and older buildings, in this Q&A.
Q: What do you want to understand or solve through this project?
Napolitano: The simple answer is that our current natural disaster — especially tornado — models are failing our historic towns. They're built for modern structures, not the old, brick-and-mortar "Main Street" buildings that are the backbone of so many rural and inner-city communities. We saw this firsthand in Mayfield, Kentucky, after the 2021 tornado. Our best models underpredicted the damage to 80% of the older, unreinforced masonry buildings and, even more starkly, underpredicted the recovery time for 100% of them. That's not just a small error; it's a fundamental failure. It means we're giving people a false sense of security and completely failing to provide them with the right tools.
This project is my answer to that. I want to build the first model that actually works for these towns by integrating the three things that matter: the engineering, the social science and the historic preservation context. We're going to finally model why these structures are vulnerable and what really influences a community's ability to recover its historic heart.
Q: How will advances in this area impact society?
Napolitano: This research is about protecting the social and economic hubs of our communities. These older, unreinforced masonry buildings are not just historic; they often serve as hubs for vulnerable populations, small businesses, affordable housing and cultural identity. Research shows these areas correlate with more women and minority-owned businesses. Protecting them protects the social and economic resilience of these historically underserved rural and inner-city areas. The most direct impact will be translating this research into actionable resources. We will co-create practitioner guides for engineers and architects, as well as community tip sheets for city planners and building owners. This gives them practical, evidence-based tools for pre-disaster vulnerability assessment, adaptation planning and post-disaster recovery before the next disaster strikes.
Q: Will undergraduate or graduate students contribute to this research? How?
Napolitano: Absolutely — this isn't a project I'll be doing alone in my office! My doctoral students, Yishuang Wang and Marcio Ferreira, are working side-by-side with me to build and test these new models, and we'retackling the problem at multiple levels to get the full engineering picture. Yishuang is focusing on the community-scale models to understand district-wide risks, while Marcio is diving deep into the building component-level simulations to see exactly how and why specific parts of these structures fail.
And this project is really built on a foundation laid by other students. It scales up the doctoral work of Saanchi Kaushal, who graduated last year from my group, and is a direct result of the NSF RAPID grant I received after my group’s trip to Mayfield with Mariantonieta Gutierrez Soto from the School of Engineering Design and Innovation. We've had several undergraduates do that preliminary work, and I already have six more undergraduates in my lab who are working on this.
In addition, there are about 100 to 120 undergraduate students per year who take my “Architectural Engineering 240: Introduction to Programming and Data Science" class and use real-world recovery data from Mayfield, learning to analyze and visualize it using Python. Additionally, graduate students in “Architectural Engineering 537: Building Performance Failures and Forensic Techniques” will apply the new simulation models developed in this research to case study projects.
Students will also have opportunities for pre-deployment training and collaboration with professionals in disaster-affected communities through our partnership with the Association of Preservation Technology's Disaster Response Initiative that I co-lead.
Q: The NSF CAREER award not only funds a research project, but it also recognizes the potential of the recipient as a researcher, educator and leader in their field. How do you hope to fulfill that potential?
Napolitano: This award is the key to building the research program I've been working toward my entire career. When I was doing my doctoral fieldwork in post-disaster zones in Nepal and Cuba, I had this realization: You cannot separate the engineering from the cultural and social context. They are inextricable problems.
I saw a massive gap between what traditional engineering could solve and what communities actually needed. I came to Penn State to build a program that bridges that gap, and this CAREER award is the catalyst. It gives me the five-year runway to build this interdisciplinary framework and, I hope, become a leader in developing these community-centered solutions. It also gives me the platform to build that entire educational pipeline — from our undergrads to our doctoral students — that trains a new generation of professionals who are both data-driven and culturally fluent.
Q: How does the NSF CAREER award uniquely help advance your research goals?
Napolitano: Honestly, this kind of research is impossible with a standard two- or three-year grant. You can't build trust or understand the deep social factors of a community in a short-term project — you have to show up and keep showing up! The five-year structure of the CAREER award gives us the time to build those deep community relationships, which are essential for our qualitative interviews. But just as importantly, the CAREER award is special because it demands the integration of research and education. It funds the entire vision. It gives us the resources to not only do the research, but to simultaneously build the undergraduate modules, the graduate case studies and the professional workshops that will actually scale this knowledge. It sees the research and the education as one and the same, which is exactly what my lab is all about.
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