Bandana Kar

Bandana Kar is a senior scientist and the group lead of the Built Environment Characterization Group in the National Security Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She was an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Southern Mississippi before joining ORNL in 2017. Currently, she holds a joint faculty position in the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests include energy security and resilience, risk and resilience modeling of communities and critical infrastructures, socioeconomic vulnerability, and energy justice. In Kar’s research, she develops data-driven solutions, algorithms, and decision support tools focusing on the intersection of science, technology, and policy to address energy and infrastructure resilience to extreme events. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Kar was the recipient of the 2019 Emerging Scholar Award from the American Association of Geographers and was a fellow of the 2009 NSF’s Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards and Disasters Researchers Fellowship Program. She received the Outstanding Service Award for Establishing the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee from the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) in 2022. She has coedited the book Risk Communication and Community Resilience. Kar is also an associate editor for the American Society of Civil Engineers Natural Hazards Review, Springer’s Computational Urban Science, and Routledge’s GIScience and Remote Sensing journals. She is a co-organizer and co-founder of the International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems’ Advances in Resilient and Intelligent Cities workshop. Kar is also the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing vice president.