The CONVERGE facility, headquartered at the Natural Hazards Center, was pleased to host two National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF-REU) participants during summer 2023: Luis Verdin-Gomez from Rice University and Francisco Vidal-Franceschi from the University of Puerto Rico–Rio Piedras.
“We were honored to host Luis and Francisco here in Boulder,” said Natural Hazards Center and CONVERGE Director, Lori Peek. “Our team benefitted enormously from the presence of these talented undergraduates who are engaging in cutting edge research at the interface of multiple disciplines.”
Luis Verdin-Gomez is a senior and statistics and sociology double major at Rice University. He is interested in social vulnerability, quantitative methods, computational social science, and sociology of disaster. Before joining the NSF-REU program, Verdin-Gomez had served as a research assistant on projects related to the construction of vulnerability indices for hazards risk and flood-health vulnerability. These indices quantitatively measure risk and were developed in coordination with local community partners. During his time at the University of Colorado Boulder, Verdin-Gomez developed two check sheets for the CONVERGE Extreme Events Research Check Sheets Series. His work, which was supervised by Natural Hazards Center research associate Carson MacPherson-Krutsky, advanced the series offerings in the areas of perishable data collection and social vulnerability indices, respectively.
Francisco Vidal-Franceschi is an anthropology and sociology senior at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus (UPRRP). His main interests lie in the sociolinguistics of disaster. Before joining the NSF-REU program, Vidal-Franceschi was employed as a research assistant at the Salvador Padilla Escabí Graduate School of Planning at UPRRP, specializing in topics such as risk communication in concurrent disasters, decision making, and community co-production of knowledge. While at the University of Colorado Boulder, Vidal-Franceschi undertook a research project on language, racialization, and disaster to ascertain the impacts of linguistic inaccessibility in disaster recovery planning and policy on Mexican-Origin women and community-based organizations. Natural Hazards Center graduate research assistant Melissa Villarreal served as Vidal-Franceschi’s research supervisor for the NSF-REU experience.
The opportunity to host Verdin-Gomez and Vidal-Franceschi was made possible through the broader Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) network, of which CONVERGE is a part. For the past several years, NHERI has funded about 164 undergraduate students from engineering and now includes students from the social sciences, as well. Verdin-Gomez and Vidal-Franceschi's final poster presentations on their NSF-REU research are available here.
The goal of the NSF-REU program is to meaningfully involve students in ongoing research programs or projects specifically designed for the REU program. Learn more about the program on the NSF website.