Dr. Bandana Kar is a Senior Scientist in the Resilient Infrastructure Science and Applications Group within NREL's Energy Security and Resilience Center. She was an AAAS Science, Technology and Policy Fellow at the U.S. Dept. of Energy (2022 – 2024) where she worked on thermal storage and building opaque envelope portfolios to address energy efficiency and customer energy resilience. She was a Senior Scientist and a Group Lead at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2017-2022), and a tenured Associate Professor at University of Southern Mississippi (2008-2017).
Her focus is to increase deployment of science, technology and policies to reduce disaster risks, improve capacity building, and resilience from a multi-dimensional perspective. Her expertise include energy and community resilience, disaster recovery, risk and resilience modeling, social vulnerability assessment, loss and damage assessment, risk communication, network modeling, siting analysis, geospatial analytics and modeling, remote sensing. She uses geospatial and computational sciences to develop algorithms and tools to assess and improve resilience of communities and critical infrastructures to extreme events.
She has received $15+ million in funding from NASA, NSF, DOE and DHS for her research. Some of her research include – forecasting flood risk globally on a daily basis for flood early warning; supply chain modeling of oil and natural gas following tropical storm events; restoration modeling of power outages for resource planning; spatiotemporal distribution of power outages using satellite imagery; spatial optimization and siting of emergency evacuation shelters and energy infrastructures; network analysis and accessibility modeling of hospitals and cooling centers; planning of energy storage systems to address thermal resilience and energy burden.
She has published 60+ peer-reviewed manuscripts and is the coeditor of the book Risk Communication and Community Resilience. She was the recipient of the 2019 Emerging Scholar Award from the American Association of Geographers and a fellow of the 2009 NSF’s Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards and Disasters Researchers Fellowship Program. She has served on the White House - OSTP’s Social and Bahavioral Sciences Subcommittee and contributed to the Blueprint for the Use of Social and Behavioral Science to Advance Evidence-Based Policymaking. She represented the US Government at the 2024 PH-US-UNCTAD Harnessing Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Workshop, a joint initiative of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) of the Republic of the Philippines, the United States of America, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development to assist member countries in reducing disaster risks.
Bandana is the 2024 President of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing; Social Science Editor, Natural Hazards Review journal; Associate Editor, GIScience and Remote Sensing journal; Theme Editor, Urban Lifeline journal.