Daan Liang

Daan Liang is the program director for the Humans, Disasters, and Built Environment (HDBE) program at the National Science Foundation. The program supports fundamental, multidisciplinary research on the interactions between humans and the built environment within and among communities exposed to natural, technological, and other types of hazards and disasters. Before his current assignment, Liang was a professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering and the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure (CSI) director at the University of Alabama. His research interests include wind damage assessment, recovery, and mitigation, community resilience to natural hazards, risk transfer and hedging, and construction engineering. He has been supported by grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Texas Department of Transportation, private industry, and charitable foundation. Liang co-founded and co-directed an NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) on Wind Hazard and Infrastructure Performance (WHIP). In addition, Liang has held various academic and administrative positions at Texas Tech University.

Liang received his bachelor’s degree in engineering management from Tianjin University, China, in 1997 and both his MS (1999) and PhD (2001) in civil engineering from the University of Buffalo, New York. He is a licensed professional engineer in Texas.