Organization

Director of the Center: Professor Shinichi Egawa
Deputy Director of the Center: Professor Shunichi Koshimura

 

Establishing Co-creation Center for Disaster Resilience
In April 2022, the International Research Institute of Disaster Science, Tohoku University founded the "Co-creation Center for Disaster Resilience" which aims to co-create disaster resilience, the ability of societies and social systems to respond promptly and effectively to natural disasters, and exploiting lessons in the future disaster management.

 

Consisting of four research areas; "Quantifying disaster resilience," "Human resilience," "Curation of disaster information," and "Practice of co-creation," we will conduct collaborative research on identifying disaster processes as both natural and social phenomena and seeking ways to enhance our resilience with the "emergence of collective intelligence".

 

Disaster Resilience
Resilience is defined as: “The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions” (UNISDR, 2009).

 

Four Research Divisions of the Center
1. Quantifying Disaster Resilience Division
Division Chief: Professor Shunichi Koshimura
  The "Quantifying disaster resilience" Division focuses on establishing methodologies to quantify "disaster resilience" and clarifies what measures and responses enhance resilience and their effects on society. This research area is also in charge of developing "Disaster Digital Twin". "Disaster Digital twin" is the fusion of data-interpretation-inference, to capture the real physical world from various sensors and simulations, creating a copy (or twin) in the virtual world (on a computer), running simulations with the copied data to find out optimal solutions for enhancing disaster resilience, and provide the insights into the physical world’s policy or decision.

 

2. Human Resilience Division
Division Chief: Professor Shinichi Egawa
  This Division assesses the damage to physical and psychosocial well-being by a disaster in a real-time and quantitative manner to support the data-driven decision making in disaster medical and public health response. Our research project combines real medical and public health information with other disaster information using the digital twin technology to promote data-driven disaster medical and public health research. This division aims at digital transformation at hospitals, evacuation centers, welfare evacuation centers, and own homes to develop the capacities of self-help, and mutual help together with more personalized public help to mitigate the damage to physical and psychosocial well-being. Our topics will include long-term surveillance of mental health and the burden of diseases, using cohort studies and health simulations. It will enable disaster-related medical and public health research to support the improvement of well-being, i.e., human resilience. 

 

3. Disaster Information Curation Division
Division Chief: Professor Makoto Okumura
  “Curation” refers to the work of museum curators who select works of art from a large number of exhibits by a theme to facilitate understanding of the significance and appeal of the exhibits. Similarly in this research area, we will study how to select, organize, and utilize information from the vast amount of information produced by the Disaster Digital Twin to help communities and society choose what actions to take. Based on the understanding of the structural and inherent behavioral characteristics of society, we are in charge of modeling the process of disasters as social phenomena, enumerating and organizing disaster response measures, and interpreting the meaning of what-if analysis results for the construction of collective knowledge.

 

4. Disaster Resilience Co-creation Division
Division Chief: Professor Yuichi Ono
  The Disaster Resilience Co-creation Division will conduct research aimed at evidence-based policymaking and social implementation for disaster risk reduction (DRR) in collaboration with industry, government, academia, and the private sector to enhance disaster resilience both in Japan and abroad. To this end, it is important to widely disseminate analytical results and research findings to society in a visualized and easy-to-understand form. In addition, the development and provision of data that can be easily handled by users of DRR information, based on GIS, will promote the use of DRR information by individuals and the social implementation of DRR technology and collective knowledge.

 

Committee members

Director, International Research Institute of Disaster Science	Shinichi Kuriyama, Professor
Deputy Director, International Research Institute of Disaster Science	Shunichi Koshimura, Professor Yuichi Ono, Professor
Director, Co-creation Center for Disaster Resilience Chief, Human Resilience Research Division	Shinichi Egawa, Professor
Deputy Director, Co-creation Center for Disaster Resilience Chief, Quantifying Disaster Resilience Division	Shunichi Koshimura, Professor
Chief, Disaster Information Curation Research Division	Makoto Okumura, Professor
Chief, Disaster Resilience Co-creation Division	Yuichi Ono, Professor
Graduate School of Environmental Studies	Nakaya Tomoki, Professor
Multi-hazard Risk Assessment Research Division	Hiroyuki Fujiwara, Manager
Disaster Information Research Division	Yuichiro Usuda, Manager

Inquiries about the Center and GIS, liaison, public relations	Yuriko Takeda, Researcher
University Research Administrator (URA), liaison, public relations	Natsuko Chubachi, Associate Professor (Specially Appointed)