The Analytics Lab at OU has joined forces with Naiyu Wang and Amy Cerato (Civil Engineering and Environmental Science) to create a new joint research lab, the Community Resilience CORE Research Lab. The new lab space will house up to 8 PhD students and Post-Docs (6 spots already filled!) The lab space is on the 4th floor of the Carson Engineering Center on the OU campus.
Naiyu and I have been working on getting this CORE space up and running for our students for several months. We both want to thank the Office of the Vice President for Research, Melany Dickens, and Michelle Wells for their tremendous support. Michelle was (and always is) a pleasure to work with and is a great resource at the University of Oklahoma — she knows more color schemes, design features, and furniture styles than I can even dream of.
The NIST funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience is supporting several of the students and attached researchers. The Office of the Vice President for Research is supporting others (through start-up funding). The space will be used to provide students a great place to work and collaborate on resilience related issues. From optimization modeling and machine learning to fragility curves and flood modeling, the students are working together to create something wonderful — a significant contribution to engineering science that ultimately can have a major impact on communities across the nation.
Here are some before, during, and after pictures of the lab space!
The first three are after the old furniture was cleared out and before the new paint and carpet.
Then we got new paint and carpet! 
And then new workstations and great new chairs!
And then the students moved in!
Six of eight spots are filled. The seventh should be arriving this Summer. And we are looking forward to growing together over the foreseeable future!
