{"id":46851,"date":"2026-05-20T09:26:36","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T13:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webpublishing.oit.ncsu.edu\/ise-ncsu-edu\/?post_type=person&#038;p=46851"},"modified":"2026-05-28T12:10:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T16:10:04","slug":"barachun","status":"publish","type":"person","link":"https:\/\/webpublishing.oit.ncsu.edu\/ise-ncsu-edu\/people\/barachun\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Rachunok"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Originally from Wilmington, NC, <strong>Ben Rachunok<\/strong> is an assistant professor in the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at NC State University. Broadly, Rachunok works in risk and decision analysis with applications in sustainability and climate change adaptation. More specifically, his research uses methods from simulation and data science to understand how communities respond to natural hazards and climate change. Much of his recent work quantifies the disproportionate impact of climate change and extreme events on low-income or historically disadvantaged communities.<\/p>\n<p>Before (re)joining NC State, Rachunok made several contributions utilizing data science to study critical infrastructure. Notably quantifying the disproportionate impacts of droughts on low-income households in California and developing data science tools that utilize real-time social media data to quantify how communities are impacted by climate change and natural hazards. His work has been featured by Tech Crunch, Gizmodo, Yahoo! Finance, The Huffington Post, and the UN Office of Disaster Risk Reduction. Ben was formerly a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University and an R&amp;D intern at the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Labs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38589,"featured_media":46865,"template":"","group":[28,38,39],"person_tag":[2093,2061],"class_list":["post-46851","person","type-person","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","group-faculty","group-supply-chain-logistics","group-system-analytics-optimization","person_tag-ben-rachunok","person_tag-faculty"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Ben Rachunok | Assistant Professor | NC State ISE<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Ben Rachunok is an Assistant Professor of industrial Systems and Engineering Department at NC State University.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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