NHERI Summer Institute
Summer Institute Alumni Spotlight: Where are they now?
Since its inception in 2017, the NHERI ECO, along with the 11 NHERI facilities, has proudly hosted the Summer Institute for Early-Career Faculty, featuring eight in-person cohorts and one virtual session. This initiative is dedicated to empowering early-career faculty as they build a vibrant community of natural hazards researchers, gaining invaluable insights into the NHERI facilities, resources, capabilities, and strategies for crafting successful NSF proposals. To date, the 184 cohort members have collectively published 2,472 articles, secured $42.8 million in NSF awards, and received 11 CAREER Awards. Notably, 27% of graduate students and 55% of postdoctoral fellows have attained tenure-track positions, with an impressive 97% of assistant professors maintaining their tenure. Below, we highlight several alumni and their achievements. If you are an alumnus and wish to be featured, we encourage you to reach out to the ECO at eco-feedback@designsafe-ci.org.
Dr. Maria Koliou is an Associate Professor and holder of the Zachry Career Development Professorship II at the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Texas A&M University. She has degrees in Civil Engineering: Ph.D. (2014) and M.Sc. (2010) from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, and a 5-year Diploma, M.Eng. (2008) from the University of Patras, Greece. Dr. Koliou’s research contributions focus on developing Resilient and Sustainable Structures and Communities against extreme events to safely and functionally accommodate growing populations in urban areas. Her work includes system-level and community-level simulations that analyze the performance of structures and communities to extreme events. Dr. Koliou has received over $17.5 million (her share over $3.5 million) in external research funding from federal, state, and private sources, and she is currently leading a multi-institution NSF project on the Gulf Resilience Coastlines and People Focused Research Hub, focusing on the recovery of tribal communities in the Gulf region. Dr. Koliou received the 2018 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Structural Engineering Institute’s (SEI) Young Professional Scholarship, the 2021 Research Impact Award by the Department of CEE at Texas A&M, the 2021 and 2023 Engineering Genesis Awards for multi-disciplinary research by the Texas A&M College of Engineering, and the 2021 NSF CAREER Award. She was also selected as one of the NSF and Every Page Foundation (EPF), formerly the Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation, Ocean Decade Champions in 2023. She has been an active member of ASCE and has also served as chair of the SEI’s Wood Education and Wood Design committees. She currently co-chairs the Interdisciplinary Education subcommittee housed in ASCE's Infrastructure Resilience Division (IRD).
Dr. Stephanie Paal is the Williams Brothers Construction Company Associate Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University. Dr. Paal joined the faculty at Texas A&M in the Fall of 2016 after completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. She received her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Civil Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2011 and 2013, respectively. Additionally, she received a B.S. in Architectural Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009. Dr. Paal has extensive background knowledge and expertise in machine learning and machine vision and applications of these technologies in infrastructure and structural condition assessments and other infrastructure-related practices. Her research focus is on mitigating the effects of natural disasters on our built infrastructure by integrating traditional civil engineering practices with emerging techniques and technologies. Her current research interests are towards hybrid artificial intelligence-physics-based approaches, understanding the impact of integrating artificial intelligence models and methodologies in civil engineering design, analysis, and evaluation operations, and developing advanced modeling approaches grounded in real-world data for extreme scenarios.
Dr. Shahrzad Roshankhah is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Utah since August 2021. She is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UU. Her research involves laboratory and numerical simulations to model the coupled thermal, hydraulic, and mechanical behavior of geomaterials. She is the recipient of the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for investigating the hydromechanical behavior of jointed rock slopes. Her research on geological CO2 sequestration and enhanced geothermal systems has been funded by the US Department of Energy through two projects. In 2025, she was selected as an early-career research fellow of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Before joining the U, Shahrzad taught civil and geotechnical engineering courses at the California State University, Long Beach, for two years. Before that, she was a research scientist at Caltech, where she studied the behavior of hydraulic fractures in naturally fractured rocks, as well as the elastoplastic behavior of impacts in particulate flows. Shahrzad received her Ph.D. degree from Georgia Tech and her M.S. degree from the Amirkabir University of Technology, both in geomechanics and civil engineering. Shahrzad has over six years of industry experience in civil and geotechnical engineering and is a holder of a Professional Engineering License from the State of Utah.
Dr. Barbara Simpson is currently an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Dr. Simpson uses advanced computational and experimental methods to characterize structural response. Her aim is to develop innovative structural systems that improve building performance and reduce the effects of natural hazards on the built environment. Research areas include resilient and sustainable design and retrofit of building structures and offshore renewable energy systems, performance-based earthquake engineering, and next-generation computational modeling. One of her current pursuits is the development of real-time hybrid simulation frameworks for fluid-structure interaction problems.
Dr. Jenna Wong is an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at San Francisco State University (SFSU). She earned her Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. in Civil and Structural Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, focusing on seismic behavior of infrastructure systems.
Her research focuses on structural resilience and sustainable engineering, including seismic technologies and green infrastructure to improve performance under extreme events. She also explores engineering education innovations such as virtual reality and 3D printing.
Dr. Wong is a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award recipient, with work aimed at advancing sustainable design and preparing engineers for climate and urban challenges. She is active in professional service, including leadership roles with the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California (Communications Director) and ASCE committees (ASCE 7-22 SSC Ballotteer, SEI representative for the Codes and Standards Committee).
Dr. Luis Zambrano-Cruzatty is an early-career assistant professor of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University. Dr. Zambrano-Cruzatty obtained his Ph.D. at Virginia Tech and served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Maine until 2025. He focuses on geotechnical engineering with an emphasis on the use of the material point method (MPM) to simulate soil-water-structure interaction in large deformation processes for the betterment of geotechnical infrastructure under more intense and frequent stressors. In particular, he devotes his time to improving contact algorithms and investigating how granular materials transition from solid to liquid-like behavior under large deformations and strain rates. Dr. Zambrano-Cruzatty is also recognized for his work in eolian erosion. He has recently begun exploring sustainable and bioinspired stabilization techniques, such as soil carbonation and microbially induced desaturation (MID). A recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award, Dr. Zambrano-Cruzatty has also been awarded with the NSF EPSCoR Research Fellowship and the Trent R. Dames & William W. Moore Fellowship from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).