Avantika Gori
Rice University, TX·Engineering
Floods are the costliest natural hazard in the United States. They take lives, cause billions of dollars in damage each year, and disrupt daily life.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
flood risk
flood resilience
flood hazard assessment
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2028
What they work on
- Develop a flood-risk framework based on performance-based design, which judges solutions by how well they meet stated goals, and apply it in two rural Texas communities.
- Bring community knowledge and priorities into how floods and their impacts are characterized and evaluated, creating a model for community-centered flood assessment.
- Develop statistical techniques that build hydroclimate variability, the year-to-year shifts in rainfall and climate, into flood risk assessment.
- Create workflows that combine machine learning with models and observations at different scales to build decision frameworks for robust flood solutions.
More about the research
Rural communities have a particularly hard time reducing their flood risk. Flood hazards in rural areas are often not mapped accurately, and what a community cares about most can differ from state or federal policy. This project asks how better data, computer models and community input can be combined to help rural towns deal with repeated flooding.
Why it matters
Rural Texas communities that flood again and again often lack accurate flood maps and have mitigation options that don't fit their priorities. A framework built on local knowledge and better models could help these communities and county planners identify what drives their flood risk and choose solutions that hold up as hazards change. If it works, the approach could be repeated in other Texas counties.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Samuel Munoz
Northeastern University, MA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Establish a long-term floodplain observatory, using environmental sensors and sediment cores, to monitor how floods deposit sediment along a lowland river.
Katharine Mach
University of Miami, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify flood simulation technologies that most speed up modeling of flood risk under multiple flood drivers and response options while keeping accuracy, and benchmark the maximum achievable speeds.
Mary Armstead
Marshall University, WV·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify what controls flash floods in disturbed and forested headwater streams in Kentucky and West Virginia, using sensors, field data and catchment-scale hydrologic models.
The school
Rice University: 24 labs on PI Pages, $278M a year on research, 267 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.