Linda K. Nozick

Linda K. Nozick’s research centers on the quantitative modeling of risk, resilience, and complex infrastructure systems, integrating systems engineering, game theory, stochastic optimization, and risk analysis to improve decision-making under uncertainty in transportation, energy, and other interdependent networks. A unifying theme of her work is understanding how resilience investments, insurance, and policy mechanisms can be structured to mitigate losses and accelerate recovery after disruptive events. She has developed models that capture the behavioral and economic dimensions of resilience, including private and public–private insurance partnerships, protection plans for infrastructure, and portfolio-based investment strategies for risk mitigation. Her research has produced time-dependent routing algorithms for hazardous-materials transport, facility location models with equity and risk-sharing objectives, stochastic optimization methods for disaster recovery, and network models that quantify cascading failures across power, water and transportation, systems. In the insurance domain, Nozick’s work unites engineering-based loss modeling with financial decision frameworks, applying game theory, stochastic optimization, utility theory, and discrete-choice analyses to optimize layered insurance, reinsurance, and capital-market instruments to manage correlated risks. Her findings illuminate how affordability constraints and behavioral factors shape insurance demand and post-disaster recovery, and they provide a rigorous basis for designing private and public–private risk-transfer mechanisms and resilience financing tools, including mitigation and acquisition grant programs, that strengthen community resilience. Through this integration of engineering, economics, and policy, Nozick’s research advances a foundation for financially sustainable approaches to managing disaster risk.