Rodrigo Costa

Rodrigo Costa is an assistant professor at the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Costa's research investigates how communities' physical, economic, and social systems interact to create disaster risk and exacerbate socioeconomic and racial inequalities. Beyond academic boundaries, Costa has collaborated with emergency managers, urban planners, resilience officers, and insurance companies to advance the state of knowledge in disaster risk and subsequently distill that knowledge down to decisions that foster urban resilience.

Costa works in the interface between engineering, planning, and social sciences. His research focuses on developing high-fidelity, high-detail regional risk models to simulate the impact of disasters on urban communities. Costa is interested in object-oriented models, agent-based simulation, hazard and exposure modeling, machine learning, optimization, and multi-stakeholder decision-making to inform urban resilience planning. Costa received the 2021 Best Graduate Paper Award from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute for his contributions to the holistic simulation of disaster impacts on communities.