2023
Project Title: Canadian Disaster Rapid Response Research (3R) Enhancement: Initiating a Researcher Platform and Coordination Network (Can-3R)
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Insight Grants (Award #1243527, CA$338,218)
Brief Description: This project establishes Canada’s first live rapid response research (3R) researcher platform and coordination network – Can-3R. Can-3R will enable Canadian public, private, and nonprofit stakeholders to swiftly identify, collaborate, and coordinate community-based researchers and research teams to address urgent, practical, and local demands, helping build resilient and sustainable societies at home and abroad.
Project Title: Hurricane Media Coverage and Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Responses: Novel Rapid Response Research Across a Complete Hurricane Cycle in Atlantic Canada
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: New Frontiers in Research Fund Exploration (Award # NFRFE-2022-00709, CA$249,919)
Brief Description: This project employs a novel rapid response approach to examine Atlantic Canadians’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to hurricane media coverage and the coverage’s mental health and well-being impacts across a full hurricane cycle (pre-, peri-, and post). This project is innovative and significant as the first Canadian effort to conduct a full-hurricane-cycle assessment of dwellers’ hurricane risk perceptions, health protective behaviors, and acute adjustment stress.
Project Title: Asset-Challenge Shifts of Rural and Remote Communities in the Global Context of Climate Change: A Systematic Review through the Natural-Built-Social-Environment Triangulation
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grants (Award # 872-2022-1045, CA$30,000)
Brief Description: This project employs the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach to synthesize climate change and climate-induced disaster-driven knowledge, practices, and policies that address the asset-challenge shifts within the innovative rural and remote communities’ natural-built-social-environment triangulation.
Project Title: Understanding the Perceptions and Health Impacts of Climate Change among 2SLGBTQIA+ People in Alberta: A Mixed-Method Pilot Study
Principal Investigator: Shelby Yamamoto
Funder: Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Project Grant (Award # # 185771, CA$100,000)
Brief Description: The goals of this project are to spark the development of a robust research program around 2SLGBTQIA+, climate change, and health; identify unique climate change and health risks and points of intervention; highlight outstanding research needs; and share the overlooked perspectives of people in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in Alberta.
Project Title: Power Outage and Mental Health: A Systematic Literature Review.
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: Research Development Grant, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University (CA$5,000)
Brief Description: This project aims to conduct a systematic review of the current literature regarding power outage-triggered mental health impacts to develop an Atlantic-Canada-specific research project promoting Maritimers’ long-term mental health crisis and building the Maritime community resilience and sustainability. This project will be the first of its kind in Atlantic Canada and Canada.
Project Title: Disaster Experiences and Settlement Challenges of Nigerian Refugees in Canada
Principal Investigator: Ifeyinwa Mbakogu and Haorui Wu
Funder: Research Development Grant, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University (CA$5,000)
Brief Description: This qualitative study employs a phenomenological lens to portray a nuanced landscape regarding the interplay between the disaster survivors’ experience in Nigeria and their migration desire and settlement challenges in Canada.

2022
Project Title: Mindframe Connect – Building resilience for entrepreneurs: An eco-framework
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: Employment and Social Development Canada (CA$149,707)
Brief Description: This project aims to apply a social ecology approach to contextualize the entrepreneurs’ individual and collective resilience capacity in community settings of (1) Building entrepreneurs’ capacity to navigate the community-based resources (e.g., environmental, health, social, and cultural) to support, maintain, and enhance their and their teams’ health and well-being, and (2) Generating entrepreneurs’ capacity to facilitate community-based resources to serve them and their teams in culturally meaningful ways.
Project Title: Promoting older adults’ engagement in post-disaster (pandemic) reconstruction and recovery
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Connection Grants (Award # 611-2022-0173, CA$25,000)
Brief Description: This project aims to inform the older adult research, practice, policy, public debate, and education by enhancing the appreciation of older adults’ diverse strengths in disaster settings as well as connecting and building capacity among older adult-specific professionals, the general public, and other related stakeholders.
Project Title: Integrating Environmental Justice and Sustainability into Social Work Practice
Principal Investigator: Julie Drolet
Funder: SSHRC Partnership Engage Grants (Award # 892-2022-0019, CA$25,000)
Brief Description: The goal of this study is to understand how environmental justice and sustainability can be advanced in social work practice in Canada. The project will support the Canadian Association of Social Work (CASW) to learn from its membership and establish an empirical foundation from which to advance environmental social work practice in Canada.
Project Title: Promoting Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Development at the Individual, Family, and Community Levels: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Human-Animal Interactions
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grants (Award # 872-2021-0016, CA$29,999)
Brief Description: This project employs the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach to comprehensively recognize state-of-the-art HAI-specific social and health knowledge, strategies, and outcomes associated with building healthy, resilient, sustainable individuals, families, and communities to inform post-pandemic recovery, in particular, while more generally being applicable to long-term societal development practice and policy.
Project Title: Make a Disaster Plan for Your Pets”: Developing an Animal-Specific Disaster and Emergency Management Plan in Atlantic Canada
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Partnership Engage Grants (Award # 892-2021-3013, CA$25,000)
Brief Description: Collaborating with Valley Veterinary Hospital (VVH), this academia-private-agency partnership will merge research, practice, and policy-making dimensions, by overarching two fields, namely disaster and emergency management and human-animal interactions (veterinary science), to examine the community-driven, practice-oriented knowledge, skills, and strategies of preparing companion animals for extreme events. Utilizing a mixed-method approach., this partnership aims to identify scientifically based evidence to enhance human-animal welfare through developing an animal-inclusive disaster preparedness plan in Atlantic Canada.
Project Title: Passive Victims but Empowered Actors: Building an Older-Adult-Specific Training Module in Disaster Settings
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Exchange Grants (CA$5,000)
Brief Description: This project aims to build a training module of an online course to help students, researchers, practitioners, and policy/decision-makers from diverse academic and professional backgrounds gain a greater understanding of seniors’ strengths and their vulnerabilities, promoting the older adults’ engagement in disaster settings. Through synthesizing the current scientific outcomes, this training module contributes to (1) improving awareness of older adults’ age-related challenges and, more importantly, their disaster-specific contributions, and their positive impact on building resilience at the individual, family, and community levels; (2) disseminating promising practices and lessons learned about the long-term processes of older adult-driven disaster recovery; and (3) promoting older adult’s engagement in disaster settings and supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion in building healthy, resilient, and sustainable communities.
Project Title: From Passive Victims to Empowered Actors: Establishing a Global Disaster Resilience Network of Older Adults to Enhance Post-COVID-19 Recovery
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: The Vice-Present Research & Innovation International Seed Fund, Dalhousie University (CA$5,000).
Brief Description: This project forms an international partnership to contribute to fostering older adults’ leadership in disaster settings, informing improvements in age-friendly service delivery, and strengthening older adults’ resilience in post-pandemic recovery in particular, and surging global disasters in general.
Project Title: Engaging Animal in Emergency Preparedness: A Community Asset Mapping Approach
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: Research Development Grant, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University (CA$5,000)
Brief Description: This project aims to utilize a community asset mapping approach to identify various resources to support companion animal guardians to better prepare their animal family members for disasters.

2021
Project Title: Building a Culture of Community Resilience: Establishing a Social Research Infrastructure for Hazards and Disaster Studies in Canada
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: Canada Research Chair Program (Award # CRC-2020-00128, CA$600,000)
Brief Description: Canada has entered an era where billion-dollar disasters occur much more frequently than they once did. However, most Canadian communities have not yet developed the resilience to withstand these. To establish a culture of resilience, Canada must overcome key challenges. For example, it needs a national hazards and disaster research workforce, better education about hazards and disasters, and a national community-driven research frameworks. As Canada Research Chair in Resilience, Dr. Haorui Wu will convert these challenges into opportunities. He and his research team are taking important steps toward establishing a nationally focused social research infrastructure for hazards and disaster research.
Project Title: Essential but Unexpected, Under-Protected, and Undervalued COVID-19 Heroes: Individual-Work-Family Triangulation of Frontline Retail Workers
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Insight Development Grants (Award # 430-2021-00352, CA$74,979)
Brief Description: Focusing on FRWs, as the unexpected, under-protected, and undervalued COVID heroes across Canada, this project aims to promote research, practice, and decision-making in the fields of hazards and disaster research and social work, by comprehensively measuring the FRWs’ individual-work-family challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Project Title: To Rescue Animals or To Leave Them: Emotional Plight of Farm Animal Owners Facing Fraser Valley Flooding Evacuation
Co-Principal Investigator: Mahed Choudgury Haorui Wu
Funder: Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (CA$5,000)
Brief Description: Through documenting community inhabitants’ experience regarding coping with supply chain disruption, this project aims to illustrate residents-driven strategies and alternative mode of adjustments towards flood-driven supply chain disruption. This community-based knowledge plays a critical role in building community resilience and respond to future extreme events.
Project Title: To Rescue Animals or To Leave Them: Emotional Plight of Farm Animal Owners Facing Fraser Valley Flooding Evacuation
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (CA$5,000)
Brief Description: This project employs a phenomenological approach to qualitatively examine the animal farmers’ evacuation experience before, during, and after evacuation. The outcomes will support the animal farm owners’ recovery, enhance their well-being, and facilitate their pre-disaster preparedness for future extreme events. Broadly, this project will inform disaster-specific political interventions for building resilience, especially in vulnerable rural farming communities.
Project Title: A Baseline Survey: Risk Perception, Protective Behaviors, and Emotional Well-Being Associated with Media Coverage of Hurricane
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Explore Grants (CA$5,000)
Brief Description: The project develops a novel longitudinal study approach to examine Nova Scotians’ hurricane-specific risk perception, coping behaviors, emotional well-being and media coverage of an entire hurricane cycle via a three-round survey pre-, peri, and post-hurricane. This project conducts a baseline survey to collect pre-existing conditions associated with hurricane seasons in the past three years (2019/20/21) and their impacts on Nova Scotians.
Project Title: A Dual Gendered Leadership Model: Gender-Inclusive Science-Political Communication Supports Government COVID-19 Responses in Atlantic Canada
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: Research Development Grant, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University (CA$5,000)
Brief Description: This project aims to utilize a scoping media coverage review approach to examine how gender-inclusive science-political communication has been supporting effective provincial responses in Atlantic Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2020
Project Title: Virtual Programs and Virtual Community Development: A Researcher-Practitioner Partnership to Evaluate the Community-based Virtual Settlement Service Programs
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Partnership Engage Grants (Award # 1008-2020-1045, CA$24,998)
Brief Description: Collaborating with the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House (MPNH), Vancouver, British Columbia (B.C.), this academia-service-agency partnership employs a mixed-method evaluation approach to contribute to a nuanced understanding of newcomers’ challenges and benefits associated with their participation in the virtual settlement service programs and the influence of these virtual programs on building the newcomers’ social ties and community connections during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Project Title: COVID-19 and Human-Animal Bonds: A Researcher-Practitioner Partnership Committed to Ensuring Animal Welfare, Enhancing Human Well-Being, and Building Human-Animal Resilience
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: SSHRC Partnership Engage Grants (Award # 1008-2020-0246, CA$24,991)
Brief Description: This academic-service-agency-practitioner will convert the Vancouver Humane Society-driven stimulators above into a comprehensive analysis of various influences that the COVID-19 outbreak has had on pet guardians’ accessibility to veterinary medical and behavioral services. Through supporting healthy and sustainable human-animal bonds in disaster settings and beyond, this partnership will achieve the practice-oriented action research aim: enhancing animal welfare and human well-being, and building their respective resilience capacities, in order to accelerate their current recovery process and prepare them for future extreme events.
Project Title: Disaster Research Data Visualization Training Station
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University (CA$31,300)
Brief Description: In-person data collection approaches, including interviews, focus groups, and observation, play a critical role in social sciences and related disciplines, especially in research training and related pedagogical development. The current global public health measures transited almost all these in-person activities virtually. Since COVID-19 might become a livable pathogen, preventive measures would become new social norms that would require academia to adapt. This virtual data collection and training station advances community-based virtual research training and learning mission.
Project Title: Health Impacts and Responses of COVID-19 for Homeless Populations in Halifax, Nova Scotia
Principal Investigator: Jeff Karabanow
Funder: SSHRC Partnership Engage Grants (Award # 1008-2020-0033, CA$24,674)
Brief Description: This mixed-method research explores the impacts of COVID-19 on individuals experiencing homelessness and the responses by both informal and formal systems to support the needs of these individuals in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and how these systems will move forward in disaster recovery.
Project Title: A More Than Human Crisis: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Re-Thinking Human-Animal Interactions
Principal Investigator: Haorui Wu
Funder: CONVERGE Working Group Program, University of Colorado Boulder, USA (US$1,000)
Brief Description: This project argues that the COVID-19 outbreak opens a window for researchers, practitioners, and policy-/decision-makers at different levels of governmental and non-profit organizations to address both healthy and unhealthy human-animal interactions, with the aim to enhance animal welfare, promote human well-being, and advance their respective resilience for future extreme events.
Project Title: Enhancing Our Healthcare Heroes’ Overall Well-Being: Balancing Patient Health, Personal Risk, and Family Responsibilities During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Co-Principal Investigator: Rachel Adams and Haorui Wu
Funder: Quick Response Research Program, Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado Boulder, USA (US$3,000)
Brief Description: This project contributes to the public health preparedness literature by collecting timely information on the holistic experiences of healthcare providers during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. By examining factors that influence how healthcare workers balance patient health, personal risk, and family responsibilities, the research findings can contribute to a nuanced understanding of overall well-being among those providing life-saving care. This can ultimately support the improvement of healthcare infrastructure across international borders by collectively enhancing healthcare workers’ capacity to prepare for and respond to public health emergencies.
Project Title: Homelessness as Disaster and Homelessness in Disasters: Exploring Vulnerability in Crisis States
Co-Principal Investigator: Jeff Karabanow and Haorui Wu
Funder: Research Development Grant, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University (CA$4,968)
Brief Description: This project explores the successes and challenges of diverse models of support for homeless populations in the global context of climate change and disaster, identifies the best practice models and the core characteristics of successful applications through literature synthesis, mobilizes and translates research findings to inform the City of Halifax’s disaster and emergency response policy by developing a special disaster relief protocol for homeless populations.
Project Title: Exploring the Experiences of University Students Evicted from Their On-Campus Housing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-National Comparison
Co-Principal Investigator: Marla Perez-Lugo and Haorui Wu
Funder: Quick Response Research Program, Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado Boulder, USA (US$3,000)
Brief Description: With the exploration of on-campus residential students’ evacuation experiences in response to the universities’ emergency responses, this research aims to improve policies and emergency and disaster response planning at the university or college level by integrating the students’ practical and urgent needs. It also increases the educational institutions’ capacity to coordinate off-campus resources to fulfil their students’ urgent requirements, which strengthens the educational institutions’ leadership in the local and extended communities.

2018
Project Title: Evaluation Consulting Services: Building State Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters Capacities to Protect Children in Emergencies
Co-Principal Investigator: Lori Peek, Jamie Vickery, Mason Mathew, and Haorui Wu
Funder: Save the Children, U.S. Programs (US$170,000)
Brief Description: This project designs and conducts a formative, outcome evaluation of Save the Children’s Building State Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters (VOADs) Capacities to Protect Children in Emergencies project and uses the evaluation to establish state-level indicators to measure progress in meeting children’s most vital needs in disasters.

2017
Project Title: Social Work Connections for Disaster Recovery
Co-Principal Investigator: Julie Drolet
Funder: SSHRC Connection Grants (CA$25,000)
Brief Description: The goal of the outreach project is to exchange knowledge in disaster social work and to enhance the impact of research on policy and delivery of services in long-term disaster recovery by sharing recent research results, and to foster new relationships for a future study on disaster recovery in Alberta.