NSF Enabling Program

The Enabling Program is a National Science Foundation-supported initiative aimed at developing junior faculty to become excellent scholars in their individual disciplines as well as in the broader hazards and disasters research community. The aims of the program are to:

• foster the development of a diverse next generation of scholars with a career-long commitment to research on hazards, risk, and disasters;
• contribute to the nation’s future research capacity and infrastructure in these areas; and
• add important original scientific knowledge to the areas of hazards, risk, and disasters.

The Enabling Program is crucial to the advancement of knowledge in the interdisciplinary hazards, disasters, and risk field, which relies on a continuous influx of new scholars committed both to their own disciplines and to the theoretical and applied aspects of hazards, disasters, and risk. This is a unique combination. Through the mentoring process, the Enabling Program encourages a distinct form of scholarly development and builds commitment to the multi-disciplinary hazards and disaster field. It helps to develop and empower a cadre of researchers who can understand and address the complex interactions between the social, built, and natural environment associated with hazards. By explicitly encouraging multi- and interdisciplinary education and training concerning the study of hazards and disasters, the program assists early-career researchers in enhanced research quality and outputs.

The 2019-2021 round of the Enabling Program was led by Tom Cova, Tim Collins, and Sara Grineski at the University of Utah and Terri Norton at Bucknell University.

Please contact Tom Cova at the University of Utah if you have questions about the most recently funded iteration of this program: cova@geog.utah.edu.

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