Tracy Kijewski-Correa

William J. Pulte Director, Integration Lab (i-Lab) Academic Director, and Professor of Engineering and Global Affairs

Tracy Kijewski-Correa is the William J. Pulte Director of the Pulte Institute for Global Development in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, where she also serves as Academic Director of the School’s Integration Lab (i-Lab). As a professor of Civil Engineering and Global Affairs, jointly appointed in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences, she is a faculty fellow at a number of Notre Dame institutes, including the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, and Environmental Change Initiative, while also serving as a member of the Executive Committee of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. 

Her research is dedicated to enhancing the resilience and sustainability of hazard-exposed communities, with an emphasis on conceiving holistic responses to infrastructure vulnerabilities and tools that support science-informed decision-making by diverse stakeholders. She currently serves as the inaugural director of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Structural Extreme Event Reconnaissance (StEER) network, assessing the impacts of major hazard events using advances in data science. Leveraging these and other open data sources, she is similarly leading the development of regional simulation tools for hurricane risk assessment through the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Computational Simulation Center (SimCenter). Her interdisciplinary work further explores how to effectively integrate field observations, simulations, and experiments to advance coastal policy and practice, including participating in the design of a National Full-Scale Testing Infrastructure for Community Hardening in Extreme Wind, Surge, and Wave Events (NICHE), a major research infrastructure to experimentally simulate impacts of climatological hazards and mitigation solutions for frontline communities. This work complements her ongoing efforts to study the uptake of mitigation guidance for self-recovery from disasters across the United States and around the world, most recently through her service on the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine consensus study on Compounding Disasters in Gulf Coast Communities, 2020-2021 and her active involvement in the recovery following multiple disasters in Haiti, including the 2021 earthquake. 

Her contributions have been recognized by awards from the American Society of Civil Engineering, American Political Science Association, Institution of Civil Engineers, International Association for Wind Engineering, and American Association for Wind Engineering. Kijewski-Correa is formally trained as a Civil Engineer with a specialization in Structural Engineering, earning her Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame.