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In the U.S., in the wake of the 2017 hurricanes, she and her team helped coordinate recon teams in Texas, post Hurricane Harvey. She describes reconnaissance efforts as a way for to see if engineers “got it right.” Was it a problem with the structure or codes? Or did the hazard deliver an unexpected load? Unlike with laboratory and computer simulations, after a disaster, engineers get to forensically try to find out what exactly happened. Trying to capture the hazard loading on one hand and on the other, understand what the structure’s capacity was. Reconnaissance teams get to ask “Why?” On reconnaissance missions, teams not only gather data, they interact with people in the community. She says she learned that people’s political and religious beliefs affected their willingness to prepare for disaster. Trust in government or religious fatalism both inclined people to invest less in securing their homes and property. Understanding such community attitudes can help engineers reach people in language they can understand. She says in religious communities, it makes sense to have workshops on resilience and preparedness run through their church, by their pastors. She describes making recon assessments, covering dozens of homes each day. Her teams use an application called Fulcrum, a mobile data collector. This season, her teams in Texas post-Harvey collected 1,685 assessments; in Florida post-Irma 1,094 assessments; and in Puerto Rico after Maria 260 assessments. The team in the Virgin Islands is currently collecting data. Kijewski-Correa says she always includes time to speak with people, even though it slows things down. People who have been through disaster often ask questions about their homes, and she answers as best she can. She describes being amazed at the strength of people she met in Texas, who showed true American spirit. “Strength greater than a building,” she says. She discusses how communities make decisions, even without much data. They took care of their neighbors, which was what they did know. But to carry out new engineering ideas, people need to trust. Engineers need to know how communities make decisions, what the barriers are to rebuilding, what the opportunities are. She calls it “the last mile problem.” Engineers need to know all the things that must happen so that the community can adopt a new system. No matter how good the engineers’ math is, they need that data to close the deal, to complete the rebuilding. Kijewski-Correa looks forward to NSF-funded projects that are able to collaborate with other funding agencies – in order to do what’s necessary to complete the rebuilding of disaster-damaged communities. “It can’t just be a miracle when the work is all the way complete. We have to do something more systematic,” she says. The last mile takes hard work and commitment, she says. If engineers are doing research to save lives and property, then more human-centered, interdisciplinary research is necessary, including cobbling together different sources of funding. For her part, she looks to NGOs, foundations, public and private sector funding. She says engineers need to stop talking to engineers, stop coming to conferences, and start talking with social scientists and public policy experts. Have new conversations, she says. In Haiti, where she and others trained locals in engineering basics, she says the people were accustomed to using their own ingenuity for solving problems: designing stoves, inventing ways to handle flooding. One evening one of her Haitian “problem solvers” described the problem: “The answer was always inside us, but no one bothered to show us.” The statement resonated with Kijewski-Correa, the idea that answers reside inside us, within every community. She sees it as her job is to empower people to implement those answers. To help them tap their ability be part of the process. Resilience is inside all of us, she says. She is committed to helping everyone find that answer.