Academic and Training Program Hub

Purdue’s Institute for a Sustainable Future drives interdisciplinary research, partnerships, and engagement to address extreme threat change and resilience, food-energy-water security, and human and biosphere health — guided by the Sustainable Development Goals. By connecting researchers across disciplines and communities, the institute supports the innovations and solutions needed for today’s complex global challenges. Its work reflects Purdue’s land-grant mission to build human capital, advance problem-focused research, and collaborate deeply with partners.

The Polis Center works with our partners to define, measure, and actively improve community health, well-being, and resiliency.Our motto is “We bring things into perspective.” Our primary service is to build understanding of issues from a variety of perspectives.The Polis Center values place. The center has been a trusted resource for Indiana and beyond for nearly 35 years, using its technical and analytical expertise to help with decision-making processes, strategic planning, and programming.A research center in the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indianapolis, Polis plays a critical role in improving community development and quality-of-life efforts; natural disaster resiliency and responsiveness to climate change and all its repercussions; and community health issues and their social and environmental determinants.Its services include comprehensive integration, analysis, and visualization of rapidly growing information on the places where we live and work to support consequential change. This means Polis helps communities and organizations increase sustainability and effectiveness; understand trends, inequities, and disparities in important issues to inform action; and transforms data into meaningful information and context and makes it accessible through online dashboards.

RedLab brings together academia, researchers, entrepreneurs, engineers, data scientists, and innovators together to get innovative solutions rapidly adopted for the greater good. Finding the best technical tools and patterns to follow can make everyone’s life easier and allow for creative solutions to our most pressing problems.In this way, we are acting as a national, state and local catalyst to enable accelerated actions and progress towards long-term impact. Our strategy is to quickly and iteratively learn, test, and validate solutions with local communities, then work with broader community stakeholders to bring solutions to a global scale.

The Humanitarian Disaster Institute is a trailblazing academic center and the first faith-based institute of its kind devoted to the study of humanitarian action and disaster response. HDI houses distinctive undergraduate and graduate programs that examine complex global challenges through a Christian academic lens. Grounded in rigorous research and informed by practice, HDI prepares students to translate scholarship into meaningful service and leadership across faith-based, nonprofit, humanitarian, and disaster contexts worldwide.

The MAE Center started as one of three national earthquake engineering research centers established by the National Science Foundation and its partner institutions. Its current mission is to develop through research, and to disseminate through education and outreach, new integrated approaches necessary to minimize the consequences of future natural and human-made hazards. Integrated interdisciplinary research synthesizing damage across regions, estimating vulnerability across regional and national networks, and identifying different hazards forms the core research activities needed to develop a Multi-hazard Approach to Engineering and to support stakeholder and societal interests in risk assessment and mitigation.The outcomes of the MAE Center research is of value to many stakeholders allowing for better informed decision- and policy-making. Stakeholders include state transportation departments, state emergency management agencies, utilities operators, insurance and reinsurance companies, managing agents, investment banks, lenders, industry organizations, and governments.In addition, many projects integrate research and education for both undergraduate and graduate students, advance curricula and outreach to pre-college students, and enhance public awareness.

Designed and taught by experts in the field, the Emergency Management and Resilience Planning (EMRP) certificate program curriculum provides interdisciplinary training emphasizing real world experience. Courses prompt individuals to develop and refine their emergency management and resilience planning skills. Students that complete the program will be able to:Analyze risk and vulnerabilities because of natural or human-generated disasters using widely accepted hazard and risk assessment methodologies.Apply emerging federal guidelines such as the National Incident Management System (NIMS), Incident Command Systems and Target Capabilities to the development of emergency management plans.Formulate strategies to develop appropriate remedies to respond to disasters and implement recovery programs in a municipal or corporate setting.Understand, evaluate and influence technological and administrative needs to plan and implement emergency preparedness, response, and recovery plans.Develop operational plans to respond to public health emergencies, natural disasters, and terrorist events.

The Climate Impact Lab has a mission to measure and communicate the impacts of climate change on people to empower effective decision-making.The Climate Impact Lab’s global network of economists, climate scientists, data engineers, and risk analysts are identifying where climate adaptations are most needed and what adaptation investments will deliver the greatest benefits to communities.

A graduate certificate in Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HSEM) from Idaho State University integrates security studies with options to study risk analysis, critical infrastructure, domestic violent extremism, cybersecurity, crisis leadership, and societal resilience. This online graduate certificate in HSEM is a great credential to create new career opportunities and can be used to get a head start toward a master's degree. Up to 12 credits of graduate courses can be taken while concurrently enrolled in a degree program and this graduate certificate program may be double-counted towards the requirements for both.Students will analyze and propose new approaches for the grand challenges our country faces in the homeland security enterprise. Idaho State University’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HSEM) graduate certificate program consists of 12 credits delivered in an asynchronous online format for flexibility. Participants select four HSEM Graduate level courses, one of which must include HSEM 5510 Systems Thinking and Sensemaking of Homeland Security Issues.