DISASTER RESEARCH CENTER

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BIOGRAPHY

Maria Porada is a third-year doctoral student in Civil Infrastructure Systems. Prior to beginning her studies at the University of Delaware, Maria practiced as a structural engineer specializing in marine/waterfront structures, and industrial buildings. Maria is currently working with Dr. Rachel Davidson focusing on household decision-making as it relates to structural mitigation of homes prior to a hurricane event using the Precaution Adoption Process Model framework and applying a multi-state Markov modelling approach. The purpose of this work is to obtain insight into how homeowners make decisions to retrofit their homes by (1) identifying the factors that trigger homeowners to transition from one stage to the next and (2) understanding at which stages of the decision-making process homeowners tend to linger or get stuck so that appropriate and relevant strategies can be developed to encourage more homeowners to act to protect their homes prior to the next hurricane event.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Disaster risk modeling and mitigation

RESEARCH

Maria Porada’s Associated Research Projects

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