Disasters affect people across all walks of life, and creating resilience and restoring communities requires collaboration among experts across a wide range of different disciplines.
Virginia Tech’s graduate program in Disaster Resilience and Risk Management (DRRMVT) promotes this collaboration through a transdisciplinary experience designed to train business analysts, educators, engineers, scientists, and urban planners to help better prepare for, respond to, and recover from the devastating natural disasters that now regularly ravage communities and ecosystems across the globe. The program brings together faculty and students in civil and environmental engineering, urban affairs and planning, public and international affairs, geosciences, business information technology, and other disciplines to develop modes of thinking and problem solving that take us beyond outdated approaches based exclusively/solely on the perspective of a single discipline. As a DRRMVT student, you will engage in hands-on work with researchers, community members, and government agencies to develop proactive solutions grounded in the needs of local communities.
With generous support from the National Science Foundation, the program offers a 12-credit DRRMVT Graduate Certificate--open to anyone eligible to take graduate courses at Virginia Tech--as well as the DRRMVT Doctoral Program, an immersive research and education program that builds upon the Graduate Certificate. Important features include:
Courses in disaster resilience and risk management to develop a big-picture perspective
Transdisciplinary thinking seminars
A workshop with community members, local governments, non-profit agencies
Elective courses in infrastructure management, natural hazards engineering, computer-based decision support, community resilience, natural hazards mitigation, and more
Prospective and current Virginia Tech students engaged in the DRRMVT program may apply for Fellowships and Assistantships, Internship Scholarships, and Travel Scholarships.