Research at the Center runs the gamut from the legal issues surrounding counter-terrorism to advanced computer simulations of urban disaster.

Large Scale Emergency Readiness (LaSER) Project
A Public Health Approach

Project Synopsis
LaSER will improve the capabilities of federal, state, and local governments, as well as private organizations, to prepare for and respond to a large mass casualty incident. The research outlined below should be viewed as an initial phase which begins to identify the basic infrastructure for large-scale response.

LaSER is composed of five related sub-projects, which will create a range of tools and new knowledge that will support the Department of Homeland Security’s, as well as other federal, state and local, initiatives in urban preparedness. The five projects are:

Computational Modeling of Large Magnitude Casualty (simulation of urban catastrophe);
Organization-Based Incident Management and Community Response (NYU as test-bed for crisis management and response);
Organizational Safety Net (creation of structures that encourage and allow employees to stay at work during crises);
Risk Communication: Addressing the Public in Times of Crises;
Legal Dimensions of Large Scale Response (understanding federal, state and local laws that strengthen or hinder the public health response to a large scale emergency).
The projects of LaSER are highly interrelated. For example, the computer simulation model Project 1 will incorporate the findings and tools developed in Projects 2, 3, and 4. Projects 2 and 3 will be engaged in their own continuous feedback loop as the work proceeds: the Organization-Based Response will incorporate the Organizational Safety Net and integrate communication strategies consistent with the research findings of Project 3.

(LaSER) Computational Modeling of a Large Scale Casualty
Summary:
Our goal for this project has been to plan, develop, implement, evaluate, and disseminate a robust, scalable, and adaptable mathematical computational model capable of simulating leadership and management of a large-scale urban medical response to handle one million casualties.

Computer simulation and modeling offers the opportunity to consider such an event and to understand the impact of a broad range of responses to inform both policy and practice. Typically, training drills in the field and tabletop exercises are used to inform policy-makers and to prepare responders for catastrophes of this magnitude. Computer modeling has enabled us to focus the design of such exercises to maximize their effectiveness. Furthermore, with the powerful computational reasoning and analysis technologies that we have developed, it is now possible to go beyond table-top exercises to help policy makers to consider a wide range of parameters, many different objective functions, and effects of several concomitant catastrophes. Although models exist to address specific components of casualty events, responses, and outcomes, we are not aware of any model that attempts to simulate a large, complex urban environment, is scalable to cover the eventuality of 1,000,000 casualties, and provides statistical outcome data at the level of detail we intend to achieve.

Key activities:
Simulation of large-scale catastrophic events with millions of active "agents."
Dynamics of catastrophe response in the presence of risk-communication, training and learning.
Devising plans to optimize multiple objective functions: Number of Casualties, Fairness, Economic impact, Legal consequences, etc. Devising Pareto-optimal plans.
Representing plans using modules and hierarchy.
Controlling plan complexity. Devising low-complexity (simple and memorizable) plans.
Algorithm development.
Model representation and development.
Collaboration with public health personnel.

Contact

Principal Investigator
Lewis Goldfrank, MD
Professor and Chair, Emergency Medicine, New York University School of Medicine
Director, Emergency Medicine, Bellevue Hospital/NYU Hospitals/VA Medical Center
Medical Director, New York City Poison Center
Website: http://www.med.nyu.edu/emergency/

T: 212.263.5022
lewis.goldfrank@med.nyu.edu

Project Manager
Ian Portelli
PhDc MScCRA
Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response
T: 212.992.9930
ian.portelli@nyu.edu

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