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George Mason University’s Prepared-NoVA Emergency Preparedness Workshop convened stakeholders on July 16 in Fuse at Mason Square to identify challenges facing Northern Virginia’s first responders and explore how George Mason researchers and students might help address them.
The workshop was organized through the Institute for a Sustainable Earth’s (ISE) network catalyst program and was co-led by Hemant Purohit, Luis Ortiz, Julianna Gwiszcz. Purohit, an associate professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology and the director of the university’s Humanitarian Informatics Lab, and Ortiz, assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Earth Sciences and co-director of the Virginia Climate Center, received grants through the program two years ago.
Purohit’s initial workshop with this funding focused on emergency preparedness in the Hampton Roads region, while Ortiz’s focused on extreme heat in Northern Virginia. This combined workshop was facilitated by Gwiszcz’s work with both network catalyst teams and allowed the co-organizers to include heat as an emerging regional hazard while examining a broader range of emergency preparedness needs.
“Having supported both network catalyst teams, the synergies between their thematic foci and networks and the opportunities for joining forces through this ongoing collaboration were quite clear,” said Gwiszcz. “I have worked in emergency preparedness and disaster response domains and I know how critical emergency preparedness capacity building work is and how important factoring in the increasingly more common climate-driven hazards such as extreme heat is to our communities."
Ortiz added, “This workshop was a unique opportunity to understand how climate data and methods are used for emergency preparedness in our region. The conversations will be extremely useful as we design new research and services.”
The Center for Resilient, Adaptable, and Safe Communities (C-RASC), where Purohit is affiliated, also was involved. “One objective is to understand the capacity-building challenges of our emergency management and public safety community in Northern Virginia,” he said. “Based on those challenges, we can build the scientific programming around them so that we can help address their current capability gaps, as well as help with capacity building for overall resilience.”
More than 30 people participated, with roughly half from the practitioner community and half from the research and academic community. Participants included representatives from organizations serving Fairfax County, Arlington County, and the broader region.
“The network catalyst program helps our faculty build and/or strengthen their transdisciplinary networks, as well as activate those networks through translational research collaborations. The workshops are just one mechanism ISE utilizes to support network building and collaborative partnership development. “said Gwiszcz.
The workshop reflects Purohit’s long-standing interest in developing research that directly supports public safety professionals. “That is our passion and our mission,” he said. “When I started the Humanitarian Informatics Lab 10 years ago, I was totally driven by this. That is why I came to academia.”
Panelist William Flagler Jr., director of Arlington County Public Safety Communications and Emergency Management said, "As emergency managers, we know preparedness is strongest when built through collaboration. George Mason is an outstanding partner in advancing preparedness across Northern Virginia by convening researchers, public safety professionals, and stakeholders. Through Prepared-NoVa and related initiatives, we are strengthening regional resilience, sharing best practices, and helping ensure communities are better prepared."
Purohit said, “If we can contribute even a little bit to assist them, it has a great impact because they do a lot of heavy lifting—with limited resources—to keep us safe.”
Relationships made at the workshop are leading to follow-up activity. George Mason students presented several ongoing artificial intelligence-based emergency preparedness research projects to Fairfax County representatives, and similar discussions were planned with Arlington County. Additional follow-up efforts to build on the ideas discussed between researcher and practitioner participants are underway by the co-organizing team.
“If you ask me what a successful workshop could look like, I believe it is these kinds of outcomes,” Purohit said. “We are able to find connections between the problem owners, i.e., practitioners and their challenges and the solution researchers, i.e., students and faculty, who are doing research within our college and broadly at George Mason.”
“These are precisely the types of transdisciplinary collaborations that we aim to cultivate here at George Mason,” said Gwiszcz. “Actively engaging these partnership networks in co-developing solution pathways is essential to addressing the grand challenges of our time.”