Christopher Burton

Ph.D., University of South Carolina (2012)

Christopher BurtonOffice: AUST 430

Office phone: 860-486-3322

 christopher.burton@uconn.edu

Research Areas:

  • Geospatial analysis of vulnerability and risk from natural hazards and disasters
  • Machine learning applied to hazard impacts and recovery
  • Index construction and validation
  • Disaster resilience and recovery modeling
  • Human-environmental interactions

UConn Geography Research Clusters:

Geographic Information Science and Systems

Spatial Analysis of Social Issues

Human-Environment Dynamics

Research Interests:

Dr. Christopher G. Burton is specialized in the application of geospatial analysis and modeling to human-environmental problems. Dr. Burton's interests include the development of methods and metrics that are critical for evaluating interactions within and between natural, social, and engineered systems. Dr. Burton’s methods include the use of geospatial analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, and the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods to better understand factors that affect the spatial distribution of disaster impacts and recovery from damaging hazard events.

Courses

GEOG 2300E: Introduction to Physical Geography

GEOG 2500: Introduction to Geographic Information Systems

GEOG 3530: Introduction to GeoComputing

GEOG 4240 / 5240: Disaster Risk, Vulnerability, and Resilience

GEOG 4519 / 5519: Spatial Big Data Analytics

Selected Publications

Burton, C.G., Toquica, M., Asad*, KMB, and Musori*, M. (2022). Validation and Development of Composite Indices for Measuring Vulnerability to Earthquakes using a Socio-economic Perspective. Natural Hazards 111: 1301-1334.

Khazai, B., Anhorn, H., and Burton C.G. (2018). Resilience Performance Scorecard: Measuring Urban Disaster Resilience at Multiple Levels of Geography. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 31: 604-616.

Burton C.G. and Silva V.  (2016).  Assessing Integrated Earthquake Risk in OpenQuake with an Application to Mainland Portugal.  Earthquake Spectra, 32(3): 1383-1403.

Rufat, S., Tate, E. C., Burton C.G. and Sayeed Maroof, A.  (2015).  Social Vulnerability to Floods: Review of Case Studies and Implications for Measurement.  International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 14(4): 470–486.

Burton C.G.  (2015).  A Validation of Metrics for Community Resilience to Natural Hazards and Disasters using the Recovery from Hurricane Katrina as a Case Study.  Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 150 (1): 67–86.