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My research focuses on capturing the damage and recovery of communities resulting from large-scale coastal hazards like tsunamis or hurricanes.
My research focuses on capturing the damage and recovery of communities resulting from large-scale coastal hazards like tsunamis or hurricanes.
Ongoing Research
Ongoing Research
Coupled Infrastructure Model for Evaluating Emergency Service Performance
Coupled Infrastructure Model for Evaluating Emergency Service Performance
Disasters occur at the crux of the built, human, and natural environments. Modeling these complex systems can be difficult but are necessary to capturing the magnitude and duration of recovery and restoration times following a natural hazards.
This work seeks to quantify the damages and recovery of emergency services through metrics that include their impacts on community members.
Completed Research
Completed Research
Islanding in Cascadia: Access to Critical Facilities and Community Defined Assets
Meselhe, A., Cox, D. T., Sanderson, D., & Tilt, J. H. (2026). Human-centered transportation connectivity and network recovery following a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and tsunami. Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 11(1), 32–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/23789689.2025.2525697Islanding in Cascadia: Access to Critical Facilities and Community Defined Assets
An earthquake and subsequent tsunami, resulting from a rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, has the potential to cause extensive damages to coastal communities in Oregon and further across the Pacific Northwest. These damages include the loss of access to people, places, resources both within and between communities - in other words: islanding. This work evaluates local and regional transportation connectivity after a multi-hazard scenario. An interdisciplinary, human-centered approach is presented incorporating publicly available data, participatory mapping, and a multi-scale damage-recovery model.
Drawing of connectivity loss resulting from hazard impacts on infrastructure.
Other Projects
Other Projects
Some of the work I have participated in doesn't directly contribute to my dissertation but has contributed greatly to my development as a researcher and in general.
Identifying Community Assets and Priorities
Mah, A.Y.J., Tilt, J., Blockstein, J., N. Fox, N. Rashid, A. Meselhe, and F.N.S. Olmeta Shult. Identification of community assets: a survey of coastal Oregonians’ priorities for natural hazard preparedness. Nat Hazards 121, 21385–21403 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-025-07626-0Identifying Community Assets and Priorities
While traditionally, critical facilities are used in the evaluation of preparedness for disasters, these do not always capture the needs and priorities of community members. Community defined assets can be useful in identifying more accurately the values and needs that may be important following a natural hazard.
1:3 Scale Testing of Hurricane Surge Impacts
1:3 Scale Testing of Hurricane Surge Impacts
In the Summer of 2025, I worked alongside a group of Oregon State graduate students, professors, researchers, and affiliates across the United States and world who came together to conduct laboratory experiments of hurricane surge and waves. The experiment in the OH Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory was designed to put elevated coastal structures to the test to better understand structural failure in extreme conditions. The video shown here show some highlights from the testing.
The button here leads to another video by practical engineering that describes the hurricane impacts on structures such as the 1:3 scale houses from this experiment.
Undergraduate research in natural hazards engineering
Undergraduate research in natural hazards engineering
Meselhe A, Vielma KI, Burgos DT and Rodrigues T (2025) An ethnographic case study of undergraduate researchers in natural hazards engineering. Front. Built Environ. 11:1535761. doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2025.1535761
I participated in a NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in the Summer of 2021. I worked with CONVERGE the social-science-led component of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) network at the University of Colorado Boulder. My co-authors, other NHERI REU students or affiliates, and I utilized reflections from written entries during the REU and from our perspectives continuing in academia or in industry to produce an ethnographic case study of the experience.
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