On April 20-21, 2023, Dr. Lei Zou from GEAR Lab attended the Emergency Management Faculty Development Workshop at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU). In this two-day workshop, Dr. Zou was invited to give a talk on "From Research to Classroom: Empowering Disaster Resilience Research and Practice with Geospatial Big Data." The presentation was based on a project funded by the PRISE program in which Dr. Zou serves as the PI with Dr. Ram from PVAMU.
In this 1.5-hour talk, Dr. Zou elaborated on the the definition and need of disaster resilience, followed by a summary of recent research projects and outcomes from the GEAR Lab, including geospatial big data for disaster resilience and geospatial big data for COVID-19 modeling. At the end, Dr. Zou shared his experience and philosophy in teaching geospatial data science and emergency management within and beyond classrooms. He also actively discussed with the participating faculty members from PVAMU and representatives from emergency management agencies about how to train the next generation of GIScientsts, GIS practitioners, and emergency managers.
