Hurricane Ian Team

Tanya Brown-Giammanco

Dr. Tanya M. Brown-Giammanco is NIST’s Disaster and Failure Studies director, leading a multidisciplinary staff responsible for conducting fact-finding field investigations and studies focused on: building and infrastructure failures; successful building and infrastructure performance; evacuation and emergency response systems; and disaster recovery and community resilience. Dr. Brown-Giammanco’s research has focused on natural hazards and their effects on buildings and roofing, the development of laboratory testing methodologies, and the development of tools, metrics, and statistical relationships to quantify and explain damage states, to advocate for better building practices and materials. She has a B.S. in atmospheric science and a M.S. in water resources science from the University of Kansas, and a Ph.D. in wind science and engineering from Texas Tech University. She is a faculty associate at Texas Tech University. She supports the management and operations of the Hurricane Ian study, and provides subject matter expertise in the wind and wind-driven rain impacts project. 

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David Butry

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Nicholas de Toledo

Mr. Nico de Toledo is a wind and coastal hazards researcher in the Structures Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). His research focuses on the impacts of severe windstorms on critical facilities and infrastructure. His academic background is in geology and coastal erosion. Within the Hurricane Ian project, Mr. de Toledo supports the team with geospatial analysis and writing across projects.  

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Marc Levitan

Dr. Marc Levitan studies hurricanes and tornadoes, their impacts, and mitigation for the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP), a multi-agency program whose purpose is to achieve major measurable reductions in the losses of life and property from windstorms. Dr. Levitan served as the first Director (Acting) of NWIRP, from 2015-2018, and is currently its Lead Research Engineer.  He headed the National Construction Safety Team (NCST) Technical Investigation of the 2011 Joplin Tornado, and leads implementation for many of the recommendations from that study.  Dr. Levitan is a member of the NCST Team investigating Hurricane Maria and its impacts on Puerto Rico. Within the Hurricane Maria Program, his roles include analysis of: the wind environment; the performance of critical facilities such as hospitals and shelters; and damage to the wireless communication system. Dr. Levitan is co-leading the Hurricane Ian study. He is contributing to the storm surge effects project and the wind and wind-driven rain impacts project.

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Steven McCabe

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Aron Newman

Dr. Aron Newman is the leader of the Infrastructure Materials Group (IMG) of the Materials and Structural Systems Division (MSSD) of the Engineering Laboratory (EL), whose team focuses on evaluating the durability of materials, including cement, concretes, and polymers. Material durability impacts the resiliency of our built environment. The use of materials for infrastructure applications is affected by chronic, i.e., long-term exposure, and acute hazards, e.g., hurricanes and earthquakes. The frequency and intensity of these hazards are increasing due to climate change, and both adaptation and mitigation strategies are needed to ensure our infrastructure is resilient. IMG is investigating the service life of these materials and developing new measurement methods to improve predictive tools that can aid in the design, leading toward improved infrastructure resiliency. Dr. Newman’s expertise in materials science, including the degradation of materials’ performance, will be leveraged for the Hurricane Ian investigation, especially related to the performance degradation of asphalt shingles and how that impacts water ingress. Dr. Newman received his Ph.D. 1998 in Materials Science and Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Since then, Dr. Newman has served in various technical and management roles addressing materials science challenges.

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Long Phan

Dr. Long Phan is currently serving as Leader of the Structures Group in the Materials and Structural Systems Division (MSSD) of the Engineering Laboratory (EL). At NIST, he has provided technical leadership and conducted research on a wide range of topics, including performance of structures and materials subject to extreme hazards. He has also conducted several field damage investigations caused by accidents and natural or man-made disasters and derived lessons for improvement in building code, standard, and practice. For hurricane hazards, Dr. Phan has served as principal member on a multi-agency team responsible for performance assessment of physical structures − including flood protection systems, bridges, buildings, and infrastructure − that were affected by Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.  He was the primary author of the Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita Reconnaissance Report and the recommendations related to hurricane storm surge hazard characterization. Following the publication of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita report, Dr. Phan developed the concept of risk-consistent design criteria for coastal structures, with consideration of local topography and bathymetry of the region of interest, for hurricane hazards, and methodology for computation of risk due to combined effects of hurricane wind and storm surge, as well as methodology to incorporate effects of waves set-up on storm surge simulation. For the Hurricane Ian Study, Dr. Phan will support the storm surge project with research on the effects of hydrodynamic actions that are associated with Hurricane Ian’s storm surge on the coastal built-environment and potential implications for building codes, standards, and practice. 

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Yalda Saadat

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Dylan Sanderson

Dr. Dylan Sanderson is a National Research Council (NRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Community Resilience Group at NIST. Dr. Sanderson’s research interests include regional risk and resilience modeling of communities subject to coastal hazards. He obtained both his master’s and doctoral degrees in civil engineering from Oregon State University. Prior to attending Oregon State University, he worked for the US Army Corps of Engineer’s Research and Development Center (ERDC) in the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory. Here, he was a principal investigator for two probabilistic lifecycle analysis models of coastal storm risk reduction, Beach-fx and G2CRM. Dr. Sanderson supports the storm surge effects project for the Hurricane Ian study.  

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David Webb

Dr. David Webb is an Engineer in the Applied Economics Group (AEO) of the NIST Engineering Laboratory (EL). He has worked on projects involving sustainable buildings, electric vehicle batteries, wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires using various economic and statistical analysis methods. For the Hurricane Ian study, he is supporting the wind and wind-driven rain impacts project and is responsible for the literature review as well as aiding in the preliminary study of remote sensing data and economic and statistical analysis of wind-driven rain impacts to both determine the feasibility of such efforts and performing the final analysis. He may also perform additional work on the development of survey questions and analysis of survey results as needed, and conduct work calculating the economic impacts of water intrusion due to wind-driven rain. 

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