Yeowon Kim
Korea University · Environmental Science
About the Lab
Professor Yeowon Kim's research lab focuses on urban resilience, climate change adaptation, and infrastructure sustainability, with a particular emphasis on integrating social, ecological, and technological systems to address flood risk and extreme weather impacts. The lab advances innovative frameworks such as the safe-to-fail paradigm and develops tools like the urban flood vulnerability index to support decision-making in vulnerable cities. Research spans green infrastructure design, stormwater management, and the trade-offs between efficiency and resilience in urban systems. The lab emphasizes interdisciplinary, data-informed approaches to build adaptive and equitable urban infrastructure.
Research Overview
Research Output Trend
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Selected Papers
15As urban populations continue to grow through the 21st century, more people are projected to be at risk of exposure to climate change-induced extreme events. To investigate the complexity of urban floods, this study applied an interlinked social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) vulnerability framework by developing an urban flood vulnerability index for six US cities. Indicators were selected to reflect and illustrate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to flooding for each of th
Abstract Floods are important disturbances to urban socio‐eco‐technical systems and their meteorological drivers are projected to increase through the century due to global climate change. Urban flood models are numerical models that have the capability of representing the features of urban ecosystems and the mechanisms of flooding that impact them. They have the potential to play a critical role in flood risk assessment, operational response, and resilience planning, but existing models remain
Abstract Motivated by the need for cities to prepare for and adapt to climate change, we advance the paradigm of safe‐to‐fail by focusing on the decision dilemmas and the consideration of infrastructure failure consequences in developing infrastructure. Infrastructures are largely designed as fail‐safe; that is, they are not intended to fail, and when failure happens, the consequences are severe. Safe‐to‐fail has been recently presented as the antithesis of fail‐safe, without any specific guidan
Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) is increasingly used to comply with stormwater management requirements under the Clean Water Act, but there is growing interest in leveraging GSI as part of climate change adaptation strategies. Success in contributing to this goal depends on what types of GSI are being used and how they are sized. Here we review GSI design storm requirements for the seven Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) cities in the United States. We
Abstract The capacities of our infrastructure systems to respond to volatile, uncertain, and increasingly complex environments are increasingly recognized as vital for resilience. Pervasive across infrastructure literature and discourse are the concepts of centralized, decentralized, and distributed systems, and there appears to be growing interest in how these configurations support or hinder adaptive and transformative capacities towards resilience. There does not appear to be a concerted effo
Efficiency (i.e. optimized use of resources) and resilience principles (i.e. redundancy, diversity, etc.) are often at odds with one another. Despite being particularly acute within infrastructure systems, this tension appears to be under-explored. However, recent advances in ecological and social sciences provide some novel insights into navigating efficiency–resilience trade-offs. Overall, efficiency and resilience are both vital for a system's longevity and striking a dynamic balance between
The fixation of weakly selected mutations can be greatly influenced by strong directional selection at linked loci. Here, I investigate a two-locus model in which weakly selected, reversible mutations occur at one locus and recurrent strong directional selection occurs at the other locus. This model is analogous to selection on codon usage at synonymous sites linked to nonsynonymous sites under strong directional selection. Two approximations obtained here describe the expected frequency of the
The COVID-19 pandemic has shocked infrastructure systems in unanticipated ways. Seemingly in the course of weeks, our demands for many basic and critical services have radically shifted. With expected long-term effects (i.e., years), COVID-19 is going to have profound impacts on every facet of infrastructure systems, and will shock these systems very differently than the hazards that we often focus on, such as extreme events, disrepair, and terrorist attacks. At the beginning of this pandemic, i
BACKGROUND: . The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is the United States national passive vaccine safety surveillance system. We updated the data on the safety of single-antigen varicella vaccine (VAR) and assessed the safety of combination measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella vaccine (MMRV) licensed in the United States using VAERS data. METHODS: US VAERS reports received after administration of VAR and MMRV during 2006-2020 were identified. Reports were analyzed by vaccine type,
Nature-based Solutions for
Research Areas
Dive deeper into Yeowon Kim's research on Nubint
Open this lab's papers in the app to read with AI, summarize, and cite in your writing.