Honoring the Legacy of Dr. Joy Pauschke: Leader in Natural Hazards Engineering and Science
Published on August 26, 2025
Dear NHERI Community,
Dr. Joy Pauschke, National Science Foundation (NSF) program manager for the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES, 2004-2014) and the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI, 2016 - present), has retired from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as of July 22, 2025.
The NHERI Community wishes to congratulate Dr. Pauschke in her retirement, and to express our sincere gratitude for her service and accomplishments during her distinguished career.
Through her more than 30 years at NSF, Dr. Pauschke had a significant impact on the safety and resilience of our infrastructure and communities. During her tenure at NSF, Dr. Pauschke advocated for research in earthquake and natural hazards engineering, as well as associated sciences, and was instrumental in bringing together expert voices to move research into practice and into concrete societal benefits. Under her stewardship, NSF’s NEES program created a national network of large-scale experimental laboratories with computational resources that fostered a collaborative environment and became the model “collaboratory” for other scientific and engineering disciplines. Dr. Pauschke promoted innovative and interdisciplinary approaches that led to the establishment of NHERI, synergizing research centers with world-renowned wind, earthquake, tsunami, simulation, computation, reconnaissance, and community resilience expertise into a single community focused on saving lives and promoting resilient critical infrastructure.
Dr. Pauschke influenced the careers of a large portion of today’s practicing and academic engineers in natural hazards through her support of research experiences for undergraduates, mentoring programs for early career researchers, and programs to provide supplemental funding for new researchers to participate in larger established research initiatives. Her work enabled thousands of students and researchers to gain access to cutting-edge experimental and computational resources, significantly elevating the capacity of the U.S. research ecosystem in natural hazards engineering.
The NHERI Council is excited to share that the NHERI program will now be under the guidance of Dr. Giovanna Biscontin, who has been a Program Director and colleague of Dr. Pauschke at NSF since 2020. Dr. Biscontin is a distinguished geotechnical engineer who was previously on the faculty at Texas A&M University (2002-2013) and the University of Cambridge (2013-2022). Dr. Biscontin is already quite familiar with NHERI as she has worked closely with several NHERI facilities and she has attended the last three NHERI Summer Institutes and the NHERI Summits in 2022 and 2024. The NHERI Community looks forward to working with Dr. Biscontin for many years to come!
The NHERI Council