As identified in the Office of Science and Technology Policy priorities memo, the United States and the world face a profound climate crisis, including an increased frequency of occurrences of extreme natural hazards with a narrow moment to pursue action to avoid the most catastrophic impacts. A well understanding of the expected natural hazard impact throughout the built environment, including location and severity, is prominent. Such estimations will yield proactive and risk-consistent hazard mitigation decisions in community planning, policy-making, infrastructural design, and retrofits.

As a researcher and educator with training in structural engineering, optimization, and data analytics, my greatest passion is to enable the full potential of physics- and data-based structural modeling for informed natural hazards decision-making. Such a passion has led the lab to the mission of pushing the frontier of our knowledge in regional civil infrastructure performance simulation, estimation, and assessment during natural hazards.