Meet Our Grad Student Scholars is a series from Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant (IISG) celebrating the students and research funded by our scholars program. To learn more about our faculty and graduate student funding opportunities, visit Fellowships & Scholarships.
Tianle Duan is a third-year PhD student in the Bowen School of Construction at Purdue University. His research focuses on urban systems and disaster informatics, with a particular interest in the intersection of infrastructure, environment, and community resilience.
A flood may affect only part of a road network, but because roads are interconnected, the impacts can ripple across an entire city. A few flooded routes can reshape how people move everywhere else. What looks like a local flood on a map can quickly become a citywide transportation problem.
In this IISG project, Tianle Duan will focus on understanding how flooding affects transportation systems. To answer these questions, the first step is to understand where flooding is occurring. Duan uses remote sensing and aerial imagery to map flood-affected areas. These data make it possible to detect flooding quickly.
Duan shares his work with his students in his Purdue course, Advanced Facilities Management.
Duan is also developing AI-based approaches to improve the accuracy of flood mapping. The method provides a near-real-time picture of how water spreads across the landscape. Next, he combines these flood maps with detailed road network data. By overlaying flood information with real-world road systems, he aims to identify which routes are likely to be disrupted.
Building on this, Duan is developing methods to assess transportation conditions during flooding. This includes identifying which roads may become impassable, which routes may slow down travel, and how these disruptions reshape connectivity across communities.
This type of information can make a critical difference during emergencies. First responders, city officials, and relief organizations need timely insights to prioritize their actions. Knowing which communities are cut off—or at risk of being cut off—can help guide rescue efforts, resource allocation, and evacuation planning.
Beyond immediate responses, this approach can also support long-term resilience planning. By understanding how transportation systems fail during floods, communities can better design infrastructure and policies to reduce future disruptions.
Flooding is not just a natural event—it is a disruption to how people live, move, and access essential services. By improving how we monitor and understand these disruptions, Duan hopes to contribute to faster, more effective responses and stronger, more resilient communities.
Beyond this IISG project, Tianle is conducting interdisciplinary research in Qingchun Li’s research group at Purdue University. His work focuses on infrastructure and community resilience under extreme weather and climate change, with particular attention to how transportation systems and affected populations respond to natural hazards such as hurricanes, flooding, and extreme heat. His research aligns with the mission of Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant to build more resilient communities in the face of environmental change.
