Shantanu Kumar, a Construction Engineering and Management Ph.D. student from the Department of Construction Management, participated in the American Society of Civil Engineers Symposium for Sustainable Infrastructure. The symposium was held April 5-6 in Denver, Colorado. Kumar’s research poster won first place, receiving commendable reviews from the symposium attendees, comprised mainly of directors of planning from all over Colorado.

Kumar presented a research poster entitled, “An Integrated Approach Towards Measuring and Developing City’s Socio-Economic Resilience – A Citizen Engagement Approach.” Kumar and construction management assistant professor, Mohammed Mehany, Ph.D., joined efforts in working on assessing social and economic resilience of cities and how to quantify their sustainability and resilience measures.

They developed the idea to collate all key performance indicators that drive social and economic resilience, to create a framework wherein cities can be assessed over a set of KPIs through a scale where a total score can then be calculated. This provides a very comprehensive framework for quantifying the total socio-economic resilience for cities, and comparing different cities based on this framework. Kumar and Mehany plan to further this research by analyzing sets of measure that can improve the key performance indicators, thereby improving the overall socio-economic resilience for cities.

Taking time to acknowledge his supporters, Kumar said, “It was indeed great to see that our research idea received such extensive approval from industry experts. I would like to thank Dr. Mehany for helping me make this idea great; his relentless thrust to make this research perfect really showed in the poster. I would not have been able to achieve this success without his support.”

The Department of Construction Management is part of CSU’s College of Health and Human Sciences