Throughout the world each year, natural disasters kill approximately 80,000 people, render millions homeless and result in economic losses of $50 billion-$60 billion, according to a World Bank and United Nations joint report. Mitigation pays back at a ratio of more than 1:5; for every dollar spent, more than $5 are saved, not including measures of human suffering (World Bank, 2008).
The Societal Risk Management (SRM) program is a cross-disciplinary program that focuses on the development of a secure and safe society. The program concentrates on risk determination, risk evaluation and risk management for natural and human-made hazards, and disaster response and recovery.
Students in the SRM program are exposed to content in reliability, risk and life cycle analysis; decision-making under uncertainty; performance assessment of deteriorating systems; the ethical, economic and political dimensions of risk management; the legal elements of regulatory mechanisms; risk perception and cognitive biases; risk communication; and post-disaster response and recovery.
Graduates are prepared to work in a variety of positions from traditional CEE design firms to insurance companies, management consulting firms, government agencies and academic institutions. Students interested in this program may also want to consider enrolling in the joint degree program with:
- Architecture (M.Arch.)
- Business Administration (MBA)
- Statistics (Applied M.S. in Statistics)