The eastern third of North Carolina is a frontier of climate change, where storm surge and compound flooding from intensifying hurricanes are playing out against a backdrop of rising seas and accompanying salinization. In recent years two storms with very different meteorological features have caused major damage. This presentation will present preliminary results from a project designed to combine data from geophysical models of storm surge and compound flooding, administrative data on property damage, and household survey data on impacts from hurricanes and other type of flooding, to better understand how individuals in vulnerable areas are affected by flood events.

Dr. Frankenberg’s research focuses on individual and family response to change and the role of community, broadly construed, in individual behaviors and outcomes across the life course. In addition to these substantive interests, two cross-cutting themes are inherent in her research: health status as a critical dimension of well-being and the close integration of methods and data. She has invested heavily in developing and implementing innovative and ambitious designs for data collection to support her own research and that of the scientific and policy communities more broadly, including the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR). The STAR project assesses the social, economic, demographic, and health impacts of the December 26, 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia in order to measure population-level response to a disaster over fifteen years. Building on STAR Dr. Frankenberg is now leading the Dynamics of Extreme Events, People, and Places (DEEPP) project, which focuses on the US. Dr. Frankenberg is trained in demography, sociology, and public policy. She is the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Carolina Population Center.

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