WORKSHOP2017 Rising Stars

October 12-13, 2017

DEAR RISING STARS PARTICIPANTS:

Welcome to MIT, and a warm welcome to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering! On behalf of my colleagues, I am honored to have you at our second Rising Stars in Civil and Environmental Engineering workshop. Through two days of stimulating scientific interactions and career-oriented discussions, our aim is to establish a cohort of the next generation of women CEE leaders and to create an open forum for you to learn and ask questions about careers in academia. The hope is that this program will provide you with insights and inspiration to pursue your dreams in a variety of disciplines, and will help establish a professional

network to continue beyond your visit to MIT.

Your acceptance to this program is a testament to your promise as a researcher and an academic. We are thrilled to welcome the top twenty early career women in civil and environmental engineering and related domains from so many different places.

I am looking forward to meeting you all and learning about your research, educational plans, and your aspirations for the future.

With best wishes for a productive workshop, Markus Buehler McAfee Professor of Engineering and Department Head MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering

WELCOME2017 Rising Stars Workshop

FROM THE DEPARTMENT HEAD OF CIVIL & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

I would like to welcome you all to MIT and to the second Civil and Environmental Rising Stars workshop! This year we selected 20 outstanding women to participate in this event; you represent a broad and exciting cross-section of research relevant to CEE. The goal of the workshop is to bring together the next generation of leaders in CEE and help prepare them for careers in academia. We hope that this workshop will strengthen the academic pipeline for women in CEE and provide the opportunity for this talented cohort to develop an academic network of peers. In addition to hearing from you through research presentations, the workshop will feature a keynote talk by the Chancellor and a series of panel discussions relevant to early career issues, as well as

an opportunity to visit the MIT campus and interact with our students and faculty. I would like to thank the Steering Committee members for their efforts in helping to organize this event and identify our Rising Stars, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering leadership and staff for its support. On behalf of the Steering Committee, I hope that you will find this week informative and inspiring. We look forward to meeting you all!

Colette L. Heald, Workshop ChairAssociate Professor and Associate Department Head, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

On behalf of CEE Rising Stars Steering Committee:Penny Chisholm (Institute Professor)Heidi Nepf (Professor)Carolina Osorio (Associate Professor)Bori Stoyanova (HR Administrator)Franz Ulm (Professor)

MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering2017 Rising Stars Workshop

FROM THE WORKSHOP CHAIR

WELCOME ON BEHALF OF RISING STARS STEERING COMMITTEE

Penny ChisholmInstitute Professor and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Carolina OsorioAssociate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Bori StoyanovaPersonnel Administrator Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Heidi NepfMacVicar Faculty Fellow and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Franz Ulm Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

WELCOME

All events held in Room 1-131, unless otherwise noted. Events open to CEE female postdocs & senior graduate students (RSVP required, please contact Colette Heald). Faculty welcome throughout except lunches.

Thursday, October 128:30 – 9:00 am Welcome from Dean of Engineering Professor Anantha Chandrakasan

Welcome from CEE Department Head Professor Markus J. Buehler

Welcome from Chair of CEE Rising Stars Steering Committee Professor Colette Heald

9:00 – 9:30 am Introductions

9:30 – 12:30 pm 11 Research Talks

Quantifying Flood Hazard & Risk in Highly Urbanized Coastal Watersheds Antonia Sebastian (Delft University of Technology) Augmented-Reality for Environmental Visualization Maider Llaguno-Munitxa (Princeton University) Advancing performance-based multi-hazard engineering: risk informed approaches Yufen Zhou (Colorado State University) An Evaluation of Various Shallow Ground-Improvement Methods Intended to Inhibit Earthquake-Induced Soil Liquefaction Julia Roberts (University of Texas, Austin) Internal Stress State of Unsaturated Clay Idil Akin (Washington State University) BREAK

Water Microbes: Comprehension and Control Natalie Hull (University of Colorado, Boulder)

nL-qPCR Pathogen Chip: a tool for stool Jessica Grembi (Stanford University) Microbial contaminants and water sustainability: assessing potential water quality risks associated with non-ingestion exposures to reclaimed water Emily Garner (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) Exploring the fate and removal of trace organic contaminants in the water cycle Stephanie Spahr (Stanford University) Tracking organic compounds in indoor and outdoor air Yingjun Liu (University of California, Berkeley) Spatiotemporal variability in the vegetation sink of tropospheric ozone and implications for air pollution Olivia Clifton (Columbia University)

12:30 – 1:15 pm Lunch

1:30 – 2:30 pm Panel #1: The Job Search & Interview Process Professor Markus Buehler, Professor Jaime Peraire, Professor Benedetto Marelli, Professor Serguei Saavedra

2:30 – 3:00 pm Coffee Break

3:00 – 4:00 pm Panel #2: The First Few Years of a Faculty Career (Mentoring, Promotion & Tenure) Professor Penny Chisholm, Professor Carolina Osorio, Professor Colette Heald, Professor Ali Jadbabaie 4:30 – 6:00 pm MIT Campus Tour with Brief Lab Tours in Parsons and Pierce

6:30 – 8:30 pm Networking and Dinner with MIT Faculty Evoo Restaurant, 350 Third Street, Cambridge

Rising Stars Workshop OCTOBER 12-13, 2017

AGENDA

Friday, October 139:15 – 11:45 am 9 Research Talks

The Water-Food-Energy Nexus: A Data-Driven, Interdisciplinary Approach to Inform Decision Making Thushara Gunda (Vanderbilt University) Efficient Solar Energy Conversion and Waste Heat Stor-

age Enabled by Molecular Designs Grace Han (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Nanomechanical property coupling towards self-sensing, damage-tolerant, and self-healing materials Shilpa Raja (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Smart Traffic Control: from Urban Arterial Networks to Freeways Negar Mehr (University of California, Berkeley)

BREAK

Shared Vehicles and their Impacts on Congestion Karina Hermawan (University of California, Irvine)

Methods for Optimization under Uncertainty with Applications in Fleet Management Ilke Bakir (Georgia Institute of Technology) Topics on Materiel Convergence Trilce Encarnacion (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) Urban Spatiotemporal Flux Neda Mohammadi (Georgia Institute of Technology) Uncertainty management for complex civil engineering systems Negin Alemazkoor (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne)

12:00 – 1:00 pm Lunch with Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart

1:00 – 2:00 pm Panel #3: Work-Life Balance (Time Management, Career & Family) Professor Heidi Nepf, Professor Franz Ulm, Professor Tal Cohen, Professor Jesse Kroll

2:00 pm Adjourn

Rising Stars Workshop OCTOBER 12 + 13, 2017

AGENDA

IDIL AKIN Washington State University

NEGIN ALEMAZKOOR University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne

ILKE BAKIR Georgia Institute of Technology

OLIVIA CLIFTON Columbia University

TRILCE ENCARNACION Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

EMILY GARNER

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

JESSICA GREMBI Stanford University

THUSHARA GUNDA Vanderbilt University

GRACE HAN

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

KARINA HERMAWAN University of California, Irvine

NATALIE HULL University of Colorado, Boulder

YINGJUN LIU

University of California, Berkeley

MAIDER LLAGUNO-MUNITXA Princeton University

NEGAR MEHR

University of California, Berkeley

NEDA MOHAMMADI Georgia Institute of Technology

SHILPA RAJA Massachusetts Institute of Technology

JULIA ROBERTS University of Texas, Austin

ANTONIA SEBASTIAN Delft University of Technology

STEPHANIE SPAHR Stanford University

YUFEN ZHOU

Colorado State University

in Civil and Environmental Engineering2017 RISING STARS

IN CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING in Civil and Environmental Engineering

2017 RISING STARS

IN CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

Idil Deniz AkinAssistant Professor Washington State University Talk Title: Internal Stress State of Unsaturated Clay

Idil Akin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Colf Distinguished Professor in Geotechnical Engineering at Washington State University (WSU). She received her PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) Civil and Environmental Engineering in August 2017, her MS from UW-Madison Civil and Environmental Engineering in May 2014, and her BS from Middle East Technical University, Turkey, Civil Engi-neering in July 2012. Her research interests are in various areas of geotechnical and geoenvironmetal engineering that include unsaturated soil mechanics; laboratory char-acterization of mechanical, hydraulic, and physicochemical

behavior of soils; expansive clay behavior; geosynthetic clay liners; and bio-geotech-nics. Among her awards are Norman Severson Geotechnical Award by UW-Madison, and several conference travel awards by NSF, ASCE, and The Clays Minerals Society.

2017 RISING STAR

Negin AlemazkoorPh.D. Candidate University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Talk Title: Uncertainty management for complex civil engineering systems

Negin is a PhD candidate in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems program in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and her Master’s from Texas A&M University, where she studied the traffic data on Texas Toll lanes to analyze travel time reliability offered by these lanes and understand the value of travel time reliability for drivers to set the optimal toll value. Her current research at the University of Illinois is mainly focused on uncertainty quantification. Specifically, she

is interested in data-driven and stochastic modeling to develop reliable predictive multi-scale models for complex systems. In one of her research projects, Negin proposed a novel data-driven probabilistic model for track geometry defects deterioration, which was awarded the First Place in the 2015 INFORMS Railway Application Section problem solving competition. Currently, she focuses on developing design of experiments and dimension reduction approaches for reliable analysis of modern complex engineering systems. She looks forward to expand her research regarding innovative uncertainty quantification techniques and explore different applications of them in various fields of civil engineering.

2017 RISING STAR

Ilke BakirPh.D. Candidate Georgia Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Methods for Optimization under Uncertainty with Applications in Fleet Management

My name is Ilke Bakir, and I am a Ph.D. candidate at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, at Georgia Institute of Technology. Starting in January 2018, I am going to be affiliated with the Faculty of Economics and Business at University of Groningen (Netherlands) as an Assistant Professor. I hold an M.S. degree from North Carolina State University and a B.S. degree from Bogazici University (Turkey). I am currently working on a few topics related to large scale optimization in transportation networks and stochastic programming: integrated fleet management in the adoption of new fleet types (such as alternative fuel long-haul trucks)

and scenario set partition sampling methods in finding dual bounds to multistage stochastic MIPs. My current and future research interests also include robust optimization in network problems, online vehicle routing, and data-driven optimization models in transportation problems. I can be reached at ilkebakir@gatech.edu.

2017 RISING STAR

Olivia CliftonPh.D. Candidate Columbia University

Talk Title: Spatiotemporal variability in the vegetation sink of tropospheric ozone and implications for air pollution

Olivia Clifton is currently an NSF Graduate Research Fellow working with Dr. Arlene Fiore at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science. Olivia completed her undergraduate studies in mathematics at University of Wisconsin-Madison where she worked with Dr. Tracey Holloway in the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.

Olivia’s research aims to quantify how tropospheric ozone, an air pollutant and potent greenhouse gas, responds to changing precursor emissions, climate,

and land use. In particular, her research focuses on how the vegetation sink of tropospheric ozone changes with meteorology and biophysics and how this modulates atmospheric composition. Olivia uses measurements and a hierarchy of models from the process level to the global scale in her research. Better constraints on spatiotemporal variability in this poorly understood sink and its impact on atmospheric chemistry will advance our ability to predict land-atmosphere interactions in a changing climate.

2017 RISING STAR

Emily GarnerPh.D. Candidate Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Talk Title: Microbial contaminants and water sustainability: assessing potential water quality risks associated with non-ingestion exposures to reclaimed water

Emily Garner is currently a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering studying Environmental and Water Resources Engineering. She obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Civil Engineering from West Virginia University. Emily is passionate about studying applied environmental microbiology, particularly as is relates to water quality and public health. For her graduate work, she is studying the presence of emerging microbial contaminants in recycled water systems. Specifically, she is investigating the presence of opportunistic pathogens, such as Legionella pneumophila and

Naegleria fowleri (commonly known as the “brain eating amoeba”), and antibiotic resistant bacteria in recycled water systems and seeking to identify approaches to prevent growth of these organisms during pipeline transport from the treatment plant to consumers. Emily is also a member of the Flint Water Study team from Virginia Tech that worked with citizens of Flint, Michigan to identify unsafe levels of lead in their drinking water.

2017 RISING STAR

Trilce EncarnaciónPh.D. Candidate Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Talk Title: Topics on Materiel Convergence

Trilce Encarnación is a Graduate Student in Transportation Engineering at the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research interests are in the areas of humanitarian logistics and sustainable freight transportation. Her research is highly multi-disciplinary, integrating principles from management, economics, engineering, and social sciences, she has authored papers and participated in several projects in these topics. She obtained a B.S. in Systems Engineering Cum Laude from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican

Republic, an M.S. in Scientific Computing at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez and an M.E. in Industrial and Management Engineering from RPI. She has received a number of awards: the 2017 Franz Edelman Finalist Award for her work in the “Off-Hours Delivery Project in New York City” evaluating the environmental and economic performance of urban freight systems. She was named the winner of the SAS and INFORMS Student Analytical Scholar competition, she is also a Fellow of the Eno Center for Transportation, and received the Leonard Braun Memorial Graduate Scholarship from Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS).

2017 RISING STAR

Jessica GrembiPh.D. Candidate Stanford University

Talk Title: nL-qPCR Pathogen Chip: a tool for stool

Jessica obtained her BS in environmental engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point. After serving 6 years in the US Army as a public health officer she worked for 2 years at an engineering consulting firm before returning to graduate school. She obtained her MS in environmental engineering from Penn State University where her thesis focused on remediation of acid mine drainage via low-cost, passive wetlands utilizing physical, chemical and microbial-mediated treatment processes. Her research interests in applied microbiology lay at the interface of environmental engineering and public health, with a strong interest in metabolic pathways and microbial ecology. Her doctoral

work at Stanford focuses on the ability of household water, sanitation, and nutritional interventions to reduce enteric pathogen burden for children in rural Bangladesh and how that reduction in pathogen infection can help drive metabolic feedback loops for a more resilient healthy gut microbial ecosystem.

Thushara GundaPostdoctoral Scholar Vanderbilt University

Talk Title: The Water-Food-Energy Nexus: A Data-Driven, Interdisciplinary Approach to Inform Decision Making

Thushara Gunda is a postdoctoral fellow at the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy & Environment at Vanderbilt University and an intern at Sandia National Laboratories. A recipient of the NSF graduate research fellowship, Dr. Gunda’s doctoral work used an interdisciplinary, data-drive approach to contribute to an increased understanding of policy tradeoffs associated with the water, energy, and food nexus in Sri Lanka. Her current research focuses on understanding natural and social drivers of water security in US states and evaluating the role of policy on efficient use of resources. Her research has been published in multiple

journals including the International Journal of Climatology and Environmental Research Letters. She holds a B.Sc. and B.A. in Environmental Sciences and Environmental Thought & Practice respectively from University of Virginia.

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Grace HanPostdoctoral Scholar Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Efficient Solar Energy Conversion and Waste Heat Storage Enabled by Molecular Designs

Grace is an enthusiastic researcher of global energy matters and a chemist and materials engineer by training. She obtained her Ph.D. in Chemistry with Prof. Timothy Swager at MIT and explored the design of organic materials for efficient photovoltaics and the fabrication of organic electronic devices through close collaborations with Prof. Vladimir Bulović’s group in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Currently Grace is a postdoctoral associate with Prof. Jeffrey Grossman in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, and her research focuses on solar photon energy conversion to thermal energy and the controllable storage in organic materials. Another major

interest of her research is in the efficient waste heat harvesting, long-term storage, and distribution in thermal batteries to remote areas in need of low-cost and renewable thermal energy.

2017 RISING STAR

Karina HermawanPh. D. Candidate University of California, Irvine

Talk Title: Shared Vehicles and their Impacts on Congestion

Karina Hermawan is currently a fourth-year PhD student in the interdisciplinary Transportation Science Program at University of California, Irvine, where she is able to combine the technical engineering aspects of transportation systems as well as the socio-political and economic forces that guide their development and use. She received the BA degree in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, the MA degree in Economics and the MS degree in Transportation Science from the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on airline and airport operations related to access, safety, and congestion. One of the chapters of her dissertation looks at the impacts of on-demand, app-based ride services

such as Uber and Lyft (Transportation Network Companies or TNC’s) on airport curb congestion as well as airport passengers’ price and travel time elasticity of demand for TNC services. She is also exploring avenues to improve high vehicle-occupancy or shared ride services such as pooled TNC’s or airport shuttles, via application of algorithms (dial-a-ride) to more efficiently match vehicles and riders and alternative design of ground transportation stops (pickup or drop-off locations of these services at the airport).

2017 RISING STAR

Natalie HullPh.D. Candidate University of Colorado at Boulder

Talk Title: Water Microbes: Comprehension and Control

After earning Civil Engineering BS and MS degrees from the University of Kentucky and the University of Colorado at Boulder, Natalie was a professional researcher and lab manager for 3 years before pursuing her PhD in Environmental Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to summer engineering internships at a consulting form and a county government, she has several years of experience as a teaching assistant. Her past and future interests center around understanding and controlling water microbiology. Natalie aspires to be an Environmental Engineering professor after defending her PhD in May 2018.

2017 RISING STAR

Yingjun LiuPostdoctoral Scholar University of California, Berkeley

Talk Title: Tracking organic compounds in indoor and outdoor air

Dr. Yingjun Liu is a Sloan Foundation MoBE Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She obtained her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2015 and was a recipient of NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship.

Dr. Liu’s research interest is organic compounds in indoor and outdoor air, which pertains to air quality and climate. During her Ph.D., she studied atmospheric chemistry of isoprene, the dominant biogenic organic compound emitted from the Earth. By combining laboratory experiments and field observation, her work

provided new insights on the reaction pathways of isoprene photochemistry over tropical forests. Her research extends to indoor air in her postdoc. She is now making temporally and spatially resolved measurements of speciated organic compounds in residences, to gain mechanistic understanding of emission sources and dynamic behaviors of these compounds.

2017 RISING STAR

Maider Llaguno-MunitxaPostdoctoral Scholar Princeton University

Talk Title: Augmented-Reality for Environmental Visualization

Maider Llaguno-Munitxa obtained her PhD from the Institute of Technology in Architecture ETH Zurich in October 2016. Her research topic focused on the interaction of buildings and airflow, and the study of urban microclimate and its dynamics of flow and transport. Maider is currently a postdoc at the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Lab at the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton university as well as adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and director of the London and New York based architecture office AZPML. Before initiating her Ph.D. studies, Maider graduated from ETSASS/ETSAB with Honors in 2006 and from Columbia GSAPP Columbia

with Excellence in Design in 2010. Maider has taught at different universities such as the Barnard College and Columbia GSAPP in New York, the ETH in Zurich and the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven. The work of Maider Llaguno-Munitxa has been published in various international architectural periodicals and newsletters as well as in -scientific journals focused on the topics of environmental sciences and design computation.

2017 RISING STAR

Negar MehrPh.D. Candidate University of California, Berkeley

Talk Title: Smart Traffic Control: from Urban Arterial Networks to Freeways

Negar Mehr is a Ph.D candidate in the Mechanical Engineering department at University of California, Berkeley. She received her B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2013. She is the co-recipient of the first prize for the best student paper award at International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2016. Negar is the winner of the Chang-Tien Graduate Fellowship, in 2015 and 2017. She was also awarded the Graduate Division Block Grant Award in 2015 and Eltoukhy East-West Gateway Fellowship in 2013. While at Berkeley, Negar was the Best Prelim Performer and passed the

Prelim Exams with distinct honor in 2014. Negar’s research interests are in controls, transportation engineering, cyberphysical systems and robotics. Her current focus is on developing algorithms and scalable tools for efficient traffic management. Negar enjoys painting, crafting and hiking. She is also an amateur astronomer.

2017 RISING STAR

Neda MohammadiPostdoctoral Scholar Georgia Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Urban Spatiotemporal Flux

Neda is a researcher in the area of city infrastructure systems with a focus on human-infrastructure interactivity. Her primary research applies the concept of spatiotemporal flux to investigating fluctuating phenomena in city infrastructure systems, linked by an underlying influence from human activities. She focuses on understanding and quantifying how cognitive exchange between these systems can inform and positively influence their interactions. She holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech (2016), where she studied the dynamic interrelationships between space-time fluctuations of human mobility and energy use in cities such as London

and Chicago. Neda is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the City Infrastructure Analytics Director at the Network Dynamics Lab, and an Energy Systems for Sustainable Communities SLS Fellow at Georgia Tech, where she leads projects that investigate human-infrastructure interactions as an interconnected system across the reality–virtuality continuum.

Shilpa RajaPostdoctoral Scholar Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Nanomechanical property coupling towards self-sensing, damage-tolerant, and self-healing materials

Shilpa is a postdoctoral scholar at MIT in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from UC Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, she showed that branched tetrapod nanocrystals can report nanoscale stress transfer, detect nanocrystal dispersion, and optimize nanocomposite Young’s modulus. She further showed that tetrapods can sense local stresses with a high dynamic range. At MIT, Shilpa helped expand her advisor’s ongoing work on solid state battery mechanics by starting multiple

international collaborations, demonstrating the importance of testing materials under controlled environments representative of device operation. She is further working on characterizing nanomechanics of solid-state electrodes for fuel cell applications, using a variety of in situ techniques. Shilpa’s plans for her own future research group are to focus on nanoscale mechanical property coupling, to build macromaterials with multimodal functionalities including self-sensing, damage-tolerance, and self-healing. Her goal is to bridge deformation on multiple length scales for fundamental insight and applications in areas such as renewable energy, biomaterials, and sustainable architecture. Shilpa has received several awards, including the Materials Research Society Gold Award, Elings Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship, and Christensen Prize for Outstanding Research.

2017 RISING STAR 2017 RISING STAR

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Antonia SebastianPostdoctoral Scholar Delft University of Technology

Talk Title: Quantifying Flood Hazard & Risk in Highly Urbanized Coastal Watersheds

Antonia Sebastian holds a BSc and a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Rice University. In 2016, she completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Philip Bedient at Rice and Professor Samuel Brody in the Department of Marine Sciences at Texas A&M. Her dissertation research focused on compound flooding in coastal environments and the influence of land use/land cover change on the evolution of flood hazard and risk in urban systems. During her PhD, Antonia was awarded an NAF/Fulbright Fellowship in Flood Management to study in the Netherlands. After completing her PhD, Antonia returned to the Netherlands as a postdoctoral researcher

in the Department Hydraulic Engineering at Delft University of Technology where she has focused on developing a framework for evaluating the socio-technical effectiveness of flood risk reduction strategies in the context of climate change adaptation in Europe. When not at the university, you may find Antonia biking along the coastal dunes in the Netherlands! In November 2017, she will be rejoining the research teams in Houston to study the impacts of Hurricane Harvey on the Houston-Galveston region.

Julia RobertsPh.D. Candidate University of Texas at Austin

Talk Title: An Evaluation of Various Shallow Ground-Improvement Methods Intended to Inhibit Earthquake-Induced Soil Liquefaction

Julia is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where she also received her M.S. degree in 2014. She received her B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from MIT in 2010. Her primary area of research is soil dynamics with a focus on the triggering of earthquake-induced soil liquefaction. The topic of her dissertation covers the effectiveness of various shallow ground-improvement methods to reduce the susceptibility of soil liquefaction for lightweight residential structures in Christchurch, New Zealand. She has extensive experience in field work and has traveled all over the world to perform

seismic testing at sensitive facilities such as nuclear power plants and hazardous waste landfills. In November, she will relocate to Norway to begin a post-doctoral fellowship with the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI).

Stephanie SpahrPostdoctoral Scholar Stanford University

Talk Title: Exploring the fate and removal of trace organic contaminants in the water cycle

Stephanie Spahr is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University under the supervision of Prof. Richard Luthy. Her research focuses on the fate of trace organic contaminants such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals in the water cycle, as well as on water purification techniques that facilitate safe water reuse. Within the NSF Engineering Research Center for Re-Inventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure, she is currently investigating engineered geomedia such as biochar for the removal of contaminants from urban stormwater. In 2016, Stephanie received her PhD in Environmental Chemistry at the Swiss Federal

Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) under the supervision of Prof. Urs von Gunten and PD Dr. Thomas Hofstetter. The research for her PhD and Master’s thesis was conducted at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), where she explored the use of compound-specific isotope analysis to elucidate formation mechanisms of N-nitrosamines during water disinfection with chloramine, and transformation pathways of benzotriazoles during wastewater treatment. Stephanie obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Geoecology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen in Germany. Besides her passion for research, Stephanie enjoys traveling and experiencing different cultures.

Yufen ZhouPostdoctoral Scholar Colorado State University

Talk Title: Advancing performance-based multi-hazard engineering: risk-informed approaches considering combined serviceability and ultimate strength of critical infrastructure

Dr. Yufen Zhou got her Ph.D. emphasizing in Structural Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Colorado State University in 2016. She got her M.S. and B.S. in bridge/civil engineering from Tongji University, China. She currently holds a position of wind engineer in SOH Wind Engineering LLC and is affiliated to Colorado State University as a Postdoctoral researcher. She has 10 years of experiences working on interdisciplinary research topics that connect civil infrastructure, natural hazards, man-made hazards, extreme loads, human health and safety, structural failure, reliability and risk assessment towards a resilient and sustainable goal for the civil engineering profession.

Particularly, she has made significant achievements in the field of coupled simulation methodology, nonlinearity modeling, risk and reliability based on long-span cable-supported bridges under multiple natural and manmade hazards. She has published over 10 referred journal papers and 6 conference papers and received several travel awards from American Association of Wind Engineering and National Science Foundation. Her paper and poster have been awarded in the Engineering Mechanics Institute Conference in 2015. She serves as a reviewer for over 10 major journals in the broad field of structural engineering, wind engineering, transportation engineering and mathematical modeling.

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Locations and Transportation Lodging: Boston Marriott Cambridge Two Cambridge Center, 50 Broadway Cambridge, MA 02142, tel. 617.252.4402Transportation: The Marriott Hotel is within walking distance to and from the workshop loca-

tion (33 Massachusetts Avenue), see map; it’s also in immediate proximity to Kendal Square subway station of the MBTA red line

Workshop: Building 1, Room 131 (33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139), see map

Guided Tour: Starts from Building 1, Room 131 and ends at Evoo Restaurant (350 Third Street), see mapNetworking Dinner: Evoo Restaurant, 350 Third Street, Kendall Square,

Cambridge, MA, see map, tel: 617-661-3866

Rising Stars Workshop | Civil and Environmental Engineering

CAMPUS MAP

Contacts:

Colette L. Heald

Associate Professor and Associate Department Head Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering heald@mit.edu | tel: 617-324-5666

Bori Stoyanova

Personnel Administrator Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering bori@mit.edu | tel: 617-253-1594 cell: 617-909-5677