News

On August 7-8, 2025 the Consortium for Enhancing Resilience and Catastrophe Modeling (CERCat) held its inaugural Industry Advisory Board Meeting. It was a fantastic two days and a true testament to the power of coming together to solve shared challenges.

Our Industry Advisory Board played a critical role providing project feedback and their voting helped us prioritize the key projects we’ll tackle together during our first year.

We are thrilled to get started working on:

• Transforming current hail fragility curves into SCS multi-hazard fragility curves

• Empirical wildfire fragility curves for residential buildings, based on past event data

• Linking regional climate variability to local TC hazard probabilities

• Multi-modal damage assessment in post-disaster scenarios with AI and remote sensing

• Parametric fragility models of slender structures under hurricane wind loads

• A nonstationary joint probability method for tropical cyclone hazard assessment

If you’re interested in these topics and want to learn more about becoming a member, reach out! Our partners receive early access to research results and can leverage their research dollars through jointly funded projects.  

This is just the beginning, and we eagerly await the results of this collaborative effort. Stay tuned for updates!

Dr. Paolo Bocchini, CERCat Director, and Director of the Center for Catastrophe Modeling and Resilience at Lehigh University, joins The Risky Science Podcast to discuss research and innovation in catastrophe risk modeling. "Research in academia and in the private sector has been progressing independently, with minimal interaction," he says. "That results in duplicated efforts and lost opportunities for synergy." The newly launched Consortium for Enhancing Resilience and Catastrophe Modeling (CERCat), a partnership with Rice University, is designed to close that gap.

Read the story and listen to the podcast episode here from The Risky Science Podcast

Exciting news! Lehigh University and Rice University are thrilled to announce the launch of our research consortium dedicated to advancing the fields of catastrophe modeling and resilience. This dynamic initiative will build strong partnerships between leading university researchers and expert industry professionals. By uniting academic rigor with practical expertise, the consortium aims to tackle critical research challenges and collectively elevate the standards and capabilities within the catastrophe modeling sector. We eagerly anticipate the groundbreaking advancements that this collaborative endeavor will yield.