Dr. Nina Lam presented an open lecture titled “Are Happiest Cities Most Resilient To Disasters? – Challenges in Community Resilience Assessment” at Penn State College of Earth and Material Sciences, Department of Geography. Her presentation outlined the major challenges related to resilience assessment, described a new model developed by the author, called the Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) model, and demonstrated a number of its applications to assess community resilience. The talk concluded with some perspectives on new research directions in resilience and sustainability research.