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STAR-TIDES Capabilities Demonstration
The 18th Annual Demo will take place from Apr. 13th-15th, 2025 at George Mason University’s Arlington, Virginia campus near Washington, DC. The follow-on event will be held in the Pentagon Center Courtyard from April 16th-17th, 2025. Please visit the “18th Annual STAR-TIDES Capabilities Demonstration” page for additional details including exhibition and sponsorship opportunities.
STAR-TIDES is hosted by Mason’s trans-disciplinary Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities (C-RASC). C-RASC’s broad scope allows resilience questions to be addressed from both technical and policy points of view, and this year’s theme and focus areas open exciting opportunities for a wide range of civilian and military collaboration.
STAR-TIDES welcomes collaboration with diverse stakeholders: businesses; local, state, federal and international governments, including defense and security interests; domestic and foreign academic institutions, including multiple Mason entities; philanthropic institutions; think tanks; and non-governmental organizations. We will maximize opportunities for exhibitors to engage with Mason students, faculty and researchers.
STAR-TIDES Fireside Chat
The STAR-TIDES Fireside Chat is a series of conversations featuring distinguished speakers on topics of interest to the STAR-TIDES community.
Videos of past Fireside Chats may be viewed on the STAR-TIDES YouTube page.
Past and Ongoing Activities
Since its founding in 2007, STAR-TIDES has been involved in a wide array of real-world events, technology demonstrations, field experiments, and focused projects, sometimes involving teams of network members. Some of the relief efforts STAR-TIDES has supported include 2007 Cyclones Sidr in Bangladesh; 2008 Nargis in Myanmar; the 2010 Haiti earthquake; the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (aka Fukushima); Hurricanes Sandy in 2012; 2015 Pam in Vanuatu; and Irma/Maria in 2017, we have been working on various aspects of PR reconstruction, emergency management, and building sustainable resilience.; Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda in the Philippines (2013), and the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, as well as aid to a damaged medical clinic in South Sudan in 2012/13, Tribal Resource Center (2021-2024) Technology demonstrations have been held every year, first at National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, DC, and now at George Mason University (GMU) in northern Virginia. STAR-TIDES has participated in conferences and exhibits from California to Dubai, and in field experimentation, largely at Camp Roberts in central California. STAR-TIDES members also helped manage an award-winning technology demonstration on expeditionary water power and communications. Since 2024 STAR-TIDES has worked in support of the Kwajalein Atoll Sustainability Laboratory (KASL) and the Applied Hope Foundation in building sustainable resilience and cultural adaptation in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. After Hurricane Helene and Milton in the fall of 2024 STAR-TIDES has worked with various groups through the Helene Recovery Coalition (now the Appalachian Recovery Coalition). Also supporting the North Virginia Department of Public Safety Communications in improving the effectiveness of training the 911 call center operators through the use of AI. AI has also been used to find drilling sites for subsidence irrigation in Africa.
Network members have investigated civil-military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as improving distributed, renewable energy infrastructures. A “STAR-TIDES Japan” network supports a Japanese Cabinet Office project on Public, Environmental Health, and Disaster Medicine and other international STAR-TIDES networks are under discussion.
From the teams perspective, in 2015 over 80 network members responded in a week to a foreign government request for support to refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, and other members supported 2018 CAPSTONE project by GMU students on community revitalization in West Virginia with information about innovative shelters. In the last year network members have formed a team to enhance rural broadband connectivity, for example in Native American communities and other distributed populations.
