Dr. Ali Nejat serves as the director of CECREH, overseeing the coordination of projects within the center and its administration. He is an Associate Professor of Construction Engineering at Texas Tech University, where his research focuses on modeling the dynamics of post-disaster housing and household recovery. Additionally, Dr. Nejat investigates equitable community resilience in the face of extreme natural hazards, such as hurricanes, flooding, and winter storms. His work aims to explore and study resilience from the perspective of communities and their inherent vulnerabilities. Dr. Nejat has received funding from various federal and state agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Texas Department of Transportation. Notably, his development of an agent-based model of collective housing recovery earned him an NSF CAREER award in 2015. His research has been published in numerous reputable disaster-related social science and engineering journals.