Melissa Bedinger is a Research Associate in Future Infrastructure with interests across complex systems modelling, human factors and technology, transport and society, climate impacts, sustainable development, and making research useful and usable.
Melissa’s research began through a BEng in Civil & Environmental Engineering and a PhD in Business Management & Human Factors with the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight, both at Heriot-Watt University.
Melissa now leads the development of the Urban Systems Abstraction Hierarchy model which quantifies the interdependencies between physical resources across multiple sectors in cities, and demonstrates how they connect to resilience outcomes. This first-of-its-kind modelling approach uses qualitative and quantitative data across multiple sectors to better understand systemic risks and cascading impacts, related to different scenarios (e.g. flood hazards; pandemics; future technology transitions). As of June 2023, she has co-authored 12 peer-reviewed articles, 4 book chapters, and 2 open source software packages.
