4TU research programme DeSIRE receives 4,5 million euro funding

The newly established 4TU Centre on Resilience Engineering received funding for a research programme to design Systems for Informed Resilience Engineering (DeSIRE). A changing climate and growing population in a world that is more and more interconnected, make societies vulnerable to incidents, disasters and prolonged stress. We need resilient systems in society to deal with challenges such as climate change, migration, the energy transition and disruptive shocks such as hurricanes and floods.

DeSIRE is a large-scale, interdisciplinary research and capacity building programme in resilience engineering which contributes to the design of systems that are adaptive to changing trends and enable agile reactions to shocks.

TPM and the DeSIRE programme
In total the 4TU Federation awarded 4.5 million euro for the DeSIRE programme. But maybe more important than the funding is the long-term capacity building. The new 4TU resilience centre unites several excellent existing research groups across different disciplines within the 4TU universities under the umbrella of resilience. “Through the DeSIRE programme, the centre will now be hiring 15 new Tenure Trackers at 12 faculties that complement the existing expertise to advance resilience engineering to a new level. TPM will be home for two of the new tenure trackers. We have one position in VTI on ‘Ethics of Technology’, and one position in MAS on ‘Modelling and governance for the response to large-scale disruptions’,” says Dr. Tina Comes of the faculty of TPM and vice-scientific director in the 4TU Centre Resilience Engineering.  

About the 4TU Centre Resilience Engineering
4TU Resilience Engineering combines craft, knowledge and expertise from scientists and engineers in different fields to tackle the grand challenges of today and tomorrow in building resilient societies, by looking at the entire system of human, natural and technical factors. The 4TU RE Centre is a place where experts from different engineering and socio-economic disciplines meet, exchange knowledge and ideas, learn together and from each other. By bringing scientist from the four technical universities in the Netherlands together, the centre aims at building the capacity to be a leading international knowledge centre bringing about and facilitating a Resilience Engineering movement.