معرفی
Dr. Erica Kuligowski is an ARC Future Fellow and Principal Research Fellow in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, where she studies evacuation and emergency communications in fire, flood, and other hazards. She holds a Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow position and previously served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park from 2011-2014.
Dr. Kuligowski earned her PhD in Sociology along with MS and BS degrees in Fire Engineering, creating a unique interdisciplinary foundation for her work. Her educational background bridges social science and engineering disciplines, enabling her to approach disaster response from multiple perspectives.
Her research focuses on applying social science theory and methods to disaster-related engineering problems, with particular emphasis on evacuation behavior during disasters including bushfire, flood, tsunami, and building fires. She specializes in people movement and behavioral data collection and analysis from emergencies, emergency communication systems, evacuation simulation modeling at both building and community scales, and community resilience and disaster recovery. Her work integrates traditional data collection methods with innovative approaches like social media analysis, GPS-based mobile phone signals, and virtual reality experiments. This interdisciplinary approach spans environmental sociology, fire safety engineering, modeling and simulation, community planning, and environmental communication.
Dr. Kuligowski's scholarly output demonstrates consistent growth in both fire safety and emergency management domains, with recent publications focusing on wildfire evacuation decision-making, social vulnerabilities during disasters, and the effectiveness of emergency warning messages. Her research increasingly incorporates advanced technologies including machine learning, virtual reality, and social media analysis to understand human behavior in emergencies.
Her exceptional contributions to the field have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards:
- 2025 NFPA's Foundation Medal for the WUI-NITY 4 project
- 2025 Natural Hazards Research Australia's Research Team Award
- Shortlisted for 2024 Resilient Australia National Research for Impact Award
- Co-editor of a Special Issue that won the Applied Communication Division Distinguished Journal Special Issue Award (2024)
- 2023 Fire Technology's Editor's Choice Award
- ARC Future Fellowship (2023-2027)
- Elsevier's Top 2% of scientists in the world for career-long impact (2021-2023)
Dr. Kuligowski actively mentors the next generation of researchers and is open to supervising Masters and PhD students. Current supervision projects include Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Wildfire Evacuation Simulations, Using Virtual and Augmented Reality to Better Understand Bushfire Evacuation Behaviour, and Augmented Training and Assistive Systems for Fire Evacuation. She has secured significant research funding, including an ARC Future Fellowship, and collaborates extensively with international partners including Imperial College London, Lund University, National Research Council Canada, CSIRO, and Fire Protection Research Foundation.
She plays leadership roles in several key research initiatives including as Co-convenor of RMIT's Disaster Research Network (2023-present), Co-lead of RMIT's Centre for Urban Research Climate Change Transformations Research Program (2021-2024), and Co-Chair of the International Association for Fire Safety Science Working Group on Human Behaviour in Fires (2021-present). She is also part of an international team developing the WUI-NITY simulation platform to model evacuation from bushfire-prone communities.
