Asst. Research Professor, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Manager, Eversource Energy Center

• What excites you most about your research?

I’m most excited about building predictive models that can serve as tools to solve real-world problems like predicting how many outages there will be from an impending storm or how long it will take to restore power. I enjoy all stages of the process – from framing the researching question, to getting all of the right players in the room (including town officials, emergency preparedness staff, UConn researchers), and testing the models under different scenarios.

• What’s the most valuable aspect of your research for people and communities?

With this research we are creating new, valuable information and tools to help businesses, governments (local and State) and communities to prepare ahead for weather-related emergencies.

Research focus: Predictive analytics, natural hazards, geospatial data processing.

Website: https://www.business.uconn.edu/person/david-wanik/