Georgia Tech Engineer Rethinks Supply Chains for Community Resilience

From a single Atlanta church to a growing network across the Southeast, Georgia Tech engineer Sofía Pérez-Guzmán is connecting communities and researchers to support resilience in extreme weather events.

When a West Atlanta church received donated solar panels and battery storage to operate as a community resilience hub, Pérez-Guzmán led an academic-practitioner team that helped the congregation turn that hardware into an operational playbook. She is now using the same model to build a regional network that links community leaders and researchers on resilience, food access, and disaster response.

Pérez-Guzmán, an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a faculty fellow at the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), focuses on addressing problems within the supply chain and transportation domains. "These challenges often encompass disruptions, human behavior, multiple stakeholders, and sustainability objectives," she said.

Before joining Georgia Tech in 2023, she was a postdoctoral research associate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

"All of the research that I do always starts with a problem that has some sort of important social impact," she said, "and then I try to draw from my expertise in different fields to help solve that problem."

Building a Network, One Pilot at a Time

Through BBISS and its Sustainability Next grant program, Pérez-Guzmán co-leads a community resilience network of roughly 40 to 50 practitioners and researchers working on community-led resilience hubs across Georgia and South Carolina, with plans to expand across the Southeast.

"Neither researchers nor practitioners alone can advance community resilience as they could if they work together," she said. "The purpose of the network is to facilitate and leverage partnerships."

Community Church Atlanta is one of the first pilots. The church's resilience hub, established in 2023, offers weekly support services and on-site solar and battery storage to keep power flowing during outages caused by storms, heat waves, or other disruptions. It is also the launching point for the Westside Resilience Corridor, a partnership of four churches along Cascade Road working to become resilience hubs for their neighborhoods.

Working with church leaders, emergency managers, and community representatives, Pérez-Guzmán and partners held a two-day workshop to map likely hazards, define critical services, and draft activation procedures. Among those partners was Beth Remmes, coastal outreach and climate resiliency coordinator for Georgia Interfaith Power & Light (GIPL), who helped design and facilitate the process. "The whole idea behind resilience hubs is creating social cohesion," Remmes said. "Social connectivity and relationships in the community are one of the biggest determinants of our ability not only to bounce back, but hopefully to bounce forward in a stronger way."

She noted that churches like Community Church Atlanta already serve as informal first responders. The resilience hub work makes that role more intentional by focusing on preparedness, programming, and connection well before an emergency. Just as important, in her view, was Tech's ability to see how lessons from Community Church Atlanta could inform future resilience hubs across the region.

Erica Holloman-Hill, founder and chief envisioning officer of Ayeka Solutions Inc. and a member of Community Church Atlanta, sees that impact from inside the congregation. In the resilience hub effort, she provides technical guidance on the solar and battery system, helps shape programming such as workforce development, and helped bring partners like Groundswell and Georgia Tech to the table.

"Georgia Tech uniquely brings the science and academia," Holloman-Hill said. "Being able to leverage an institution like Georgia Tech gives weight to some of the work that we're doing, while leaning on the technical expertise of professors like Sofía and partnering with organizations like GIPL to create models and support."

Looking ahead, Holloman-Hill said Community Church Atlanta is focused on refining how the hub operates and sharing lessons learned with other churches in the Westside Resilience Corridor. That means clarifying how the church will run the hub during emergencies, which partners need to be at the table, and how a third-party technical advisor can help keep the system performing as designed.

For Pérez-Guzmán, those kinds of relationships are the real outcome. "The relationship, the trust, the partnership - it's probably the most important outcome we've seen," she said.

Jennifer Hirsch, senior director of BBISS's Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE) and the network co-lead, sees the same value at an institutional scale.

"Universities are important members of their communities and can be key partners in sustainability and resilience efforts when they mobilize their research capabilities, students, and other resources to partner with and support local leadership and innovations," Hirsch said. "Networks of universities and communities can serve as multipliers of innovative approaches. With the resilience hubs network, we are excited to incubate new ideas that are community-centric and evidence-based and tailored to the Southeast communities that our partners know best."

Where Resilience Meets Food Access

This partnership model also shapes what Pérez-Guzmán calls her most immediately actionable project: a decision-support tool connecting local food producers, distributors, and access points in Atlanta. Her team has gathered survey and experimental data from residents in West End and citywide, testing how distance, travel time, price, and a store's ties to the community shape where people choose to shop. "We're trying to design tools for logistics and food distribution decisions that bring food closer to people," she said.

A parallel thread runs through her disaster response work, where she studies how people choose among points of distribution for emergency relief. Proximity matters, she's found, but it isn't everything. Many people will travel farther if they believe they're more likely to receive supplies, or if it lets them move closer to family. In urban freight, she has applied the same lens to city logistics, studying behavior around emerging technologies such as sidewalk delivery robots and autonomous trucks.

"Atlanta's mix of freight infrastructure, food access challenges, and weather vulnerability makes it fertile ground for that range of work," she said.

"Across every project, the constant is not only patience but also resilience. Along the way, we realize that the original research idea may no longer make sense, or that different approaches are required. The process is very nonlinear and requires revision, reassessment, and a lot of pivoting," she said. "It basically requires tons of resilience!"