Tropical Storm Bertha is moving slowly across the northern Gulf of Mexico, threatening areas from Florida to Texas with heavy rain, flash flooding, storm surge and tropical storm conditions through Friday.
Experts at Rice University are available to discuss hurricane forecasting, flood mitigation, infrastructure resilience, disaster recovery, climate adaptation and the social and political impacts of major storms.
Flooding and hurricane risk
Philip Bedient
Herman and George R. Brown Professor of Engineering and director of Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center
Bedient is a nationally recognized expert in hydrology and disaster management. He has developed radar-based flood alert systems, led multi-institutional collaborations through the SSPEED Center and played a key role in evaluating and responding to major U.S. floods and storms, including Hurricane Harvey.
Together with Rice’s Jim Blackburn, the SSPEED Center developed the Galveston Bay Park Plan, an in-bay barrier and park system designed to provide enhanced storm surge protection and navigation and environmental benefits for the highly vulnerable west side of Galveston Bay.
Jim Blackburn
Professor in the practice of environmental law, co-director of the SSPEED Center and faculty scholar at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy
Blackburn focuses on the rapid intensification of hurricanes. He can explain how global warming is increasing storm and flood risks and can discuss sustainable hurricane protection strategies involving dikes, levees, gates, nature-based solutions and carbon credits. He can also address equity in flood protection across the Houston region.
James Doss-Gollin
Assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering
Doss-Gollin is an expert on extreme rainfall, urban flooding, infrastructure resilience and flood-risk management. His research explores probabilistic hazard modeling and its applications, including rainfall frequency estimation, physics-informed machine learning for flood simulation and power grid resilience to climate extremes.
He combines physical modeling with statistical and machine learning methods to better characterize risk under changing environmental conditions. He is a member of Rice’s SSPEED Center and leads the Advancing AI for Climate Risk and Resilience cluster at the university.
Policy, community resilience and disaster recovery
Mark Jones
Joseph D. Jamail Professor in Latin American Studies and fellow in political science at the Baker Institute
Jones can speak on government responses to storms, the political dynamics of hurricane and flood-related policies and public opinion regarding these issues.
Jim Elliott
David W. Leebron Professor of Sociology and co-director of Rice’s Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience (CFAR)
Elliott is an expert in social inequities, disaster impacts and recovery. His research on wealth inequities stemming from local disasters has informed legislative initiatives in the U.S. Congress and reports from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Advisory Council. His research investigates toxic exposures from flooding and hurricanes and managed retreat as a form of climate adaptation, often after major hurricanes.
Maggie Tsang
Assistant professor of architecture
Tsang can speak to the posthurricane challenges cities face related to the built and natural environments. She has expertise in landscape, ecology, urbanism and infrastructure, and she co-founded Dept., a landscape architecture and urban design studio based in Houston.
Climate mitigation and adaptation
Sylvia Dee
Associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences and civil and environmental engineering
Dee is a climate scientist whose research examines how natural climate patterns such as El Niño and La Niña interact with climate change to influence extreme weather and flood risk. Her lab uses climate models to assess future hazards to human and natural systems with a focus on the Gulf of Mexico.
Dominic Boyer
Professor of anthropology and co-director of CFAR
Boyer studies climate mitigation and adaptation. After Hurricane Harvey, he led a National Science Foundation-funded project that examined the emotional and social toll of repeated flooding on Houston residents’ decisions to stay or leave the city. He now investigates how green stormwater infrastructure could support climate resilience in underserved neighborhoods of northeast Houston.
To schedule an interview with Rice’s experts, contact media relations specialists Alex Becker at alex.becker@rice.edu, Kat Cosley Trigg at kat.cosley.trigg@rice.edu and Rachel Leeson at rachel.leeson@rice.edu.
You can find all of Rice’s expert alerts online.