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Public services vital to our way of life,

says CREATE's Dr. Rae Zimmerman

(Oct. 2007)

“A key focus of security is its relationship to the integrity of the public services that support our way of life,” says Professor Rae Zimmerman, Director of the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Zimmerman also leads NYU’S co-partnership with the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California. She is also funded by the centers at NYU and Dartmouth College.

Infrastructure resiliency has been Zimmerman’s research focus for more than 25 years.
That focus has taken a turn with the emergence of security threats and the possible impact on our way of life. Our nation’s financial, transportation, utility and computing systems could all be weakened due to security breaches or disasters.

“Infrastructure is both a target of extreme events, including terrorism,” she says, “and a critical resource to protect in order to reduce the consequences of catastrophic events.”

Studying infrastructure through the lens of accidents and natural hazards has provided valuable lessons for security preparedness and response, says Zimmerman. With colleagues Restrepo, Simonoff and Naphtali at New York University, Zimmerman has developed measures that recognize the elements that, during a disaster, can coincide to create cascading infrastructure consequences. Critical too, are spatial patterns, such as concentration, that are important aspects of vulnerability.

For students interested in infrastructure security, Zimmerman recommends becoming familiar with how transportation, electrical power, communications, and water operate in providing needed services, how their location can be planned in a way to reduce vulnerability, in what ways they may become distrupted, and how to manage such risks.

Having earned her Ph.D. at Columbia, Zimmerman also holds a master’s in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania and B.A. in chemistry from California-Berkeley. Among other duties, she is an appointed member of the Homeland Security Advisory Committee of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board, a AAAS Fellow and the former president of the Society for Risk Analysis.