RISE 2019 Conference

Thomaz Carvalhaes is a PhD student at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability. He received his B.S. in Environmental Sciences and Certificate in Geospatial Analysis from University of Michigan - Dearborn. He’s worked on a range of climate and infrastructure-related projects at Oak Ridge National Laboratory including social vulnerability mapping, coastal infrastructure risk analysis, and designing 3D urban forms to model building energy-demand in urban microclimates. He’s helped develop interdisciplinary methods and carry out field work as part of USAID’s Global Development Research Program which focused on institutional analysis and mapping socio-technical imaginaries as potential sustainable futures after the water crisis in the Cantareira water distribution system near his home town in São Paulo, Brazil. His research interests have since evolved toward understanding urban infrastructure as complex socio-technical systems in terms of resilience to climate-related challenges. Thomaz's current work focuses on the process of integrating social considerations into engineering models for infrastructure simulations, analyzing and synthesizing methods for community resilience metrics from a complexity perspective, and connecting conceptual frameworks toward interdisciplinary resilience research projects.