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In this November 2023 file photo, the Pyramid Rock and Church Rock sandstone formations sit on the horizon, as seen from �Ӱ���̳-Gallup campus. Photo by Richard Reyes/�Ӱ���̳-Gallup.

Building community resilience

Categories: Students   Faculty   Staff   Community  

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�Ӱ���̳-Gallup professor co-leads Grand Challenges team dedicated to mitigating disaster compression

By Richard Reyes, Monday, Nov. 3, 2025

GALLUP, N.M. — A faculty member from �Ӱ���̳-Gallup is taking on the “grand challenge” of figuring out how to help communities become more resilient to a higher frequency of disasters such as wildfires, floods and droughts.

�Ӱ���̳-Gallup Professor Dr. Christopher Dyer is a co-convener for a group of researchers dedicated to improving the resilience of communities in the state and mitigating disaster compression, which is defined as an accelerated frequency and severity of disaster events.

The Grand Challenges initiative, which was launched in November 2018, is structured in three levels. Level 1 teams are concept teams, which receive $8,000 in their first year to go toward team building and strategic planning support. Teams are selected through a competitive application process.

Mitigating disaster compression

The disaster resilience team was created in response to an increase in significant disaster-driven events in New Mexico, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, floods, fires, and droughts.

Initially, the team plans to focus on addressing community wildfire mitigation because it is currently the most prevalent disaster event occurring in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and the Navajo Nation.

“The fact that [the disaster resilience team] was funded was a real breakthrough because disaster compression is, in my opinion, one of the most important things to recognize and do something about as you and I sit here — as we live and breathe today,” Dyer said.

Dyer said he has heard stories from other communities throughout the United States about the impact of disaster compression. When a community experiences a disaster, they request and receive funding to address the impacts. However, before the community can fully address the first disaster, another disaster event happens, which strains their resources and impedes their ability to recover.

Community action response team

One of Dyer’s first priorities in the disaster resilience initiative has been to collect data and create a pilot project for a community action response team (CART) in the Church Rock community on the Navajo Nation.

Dyer generated the concept for a CART in North Carolina some years ago and used grant funding to train people to be disaster resilient, improve their ability to respond to events as a community, and to have a plan they could put into place when events occurred.

“The community action response team was something that I modeled,” he said. “And it basically is getting people to communicate with each other within a church region or community region. You assign people responsibilities, such as a captain, a person responsible for volunteers, a person responsible for transportation, and a person responsible for communication.”

Dyer has been working closely on the pilot project with �Ӱ���̳-Gallup adjunct professor Dr. Carolene Whitman, who serves as vice president of the Church Rock Chapter.

The team has been surveying community members in Church Rock to collect data about basic household demographics as well as exposure to, and past experiences with, disaster events. The team’s goal is to collect a total of 300 survey responses.

The data will help identify the most vulnerable individuals within the community and map out their locations in order to save lives during a disaster event. Dyer stressed how important this type of data is, citing an incident in Chinle, Arizona, where an elderly man in a wheelchair was nearly forgotten about during a severe flood.

“That just shows you the kinds of things that can happen when you don’t know where your most vulnerable people are,” Dyer said. “Who are the elders? Who are the vulnerable? Who has medical conditions? Who doesn’t have transportation? We will have all that information for 300 households.”

A cross-disciplinary effort

When the pilot project in Church Rock is completed, Dyer and the disaster resilience team will try to replicate the CART model in other New Mexico communities.

Dyer said the initial plan is to identify one more tribal community and two non-tribal, rural communities that would also benefit from the CART model. Dyer hopes to eventually expand the initiative to all 110 chapters on the Navajo Nation.

The disaster resilience team is a cross-disciplinary team made up of several individuals from a variety of organizations. Dyer noted there are four key leadership areas of the team, including an engineering component, a healthcare component, an environmental component, and a community training component.

The other members of the team are:

• Jose Cerrato Corrales, professor, ARID Institute and Environmental Engineering
• Abhishek Roychowdhury, Associate Professor of Environmental Science; Navajo Technical University.
• William Kennedy, Associate Professor, Co-Director, Center for Social Complexity, George Mason University
• Mary Pat Couig, Associate Professor, Center for Health Equity: Planetary Health and Preparedness
• Paul Charlton, Indian Health Services, Gallup
• Yuqing (Maggie) Zou, Arts and Sciences, Psychology, �Ӱ���̳-Gallup
• Wendy Greyeyes, Associate Professor, Native American Studies

Dyer hopes the group’s work can lead to becoming a Level Two team, which is identified as a Grand Challenges Team. At that level, teams are provided significant funding and support to jumpstart their implementation plans.

“That’s my dream for sure,” Dyer said. “It would be great if we ended up with a national disaster core fighting disaster compression in all its forms everywhere we could because, hey, the human species is on the line.”

To learn more about the disaster resilience team and �Ӱ���̳’s Grand Challenges initiative,