NHERI Graduate Student Council

Parisa Toofani Movaghar is a Ph.D. candidate in Civil & Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. Her research explores the intersection of civil engineering and advanced machine learning, focusing on surrogate modeling and graph-based approaches for natural-hazard risk assessment. With projects spanning storm surge and earthquake-induced structural response, her work seeks to improve both computational efficiency and predictive accuracy, with the ultimate goal of supporting disaster preparedness and resilient community planning. Her service to NHERI Graduate Student Council includes her role as Community Engagement Chair, where she coordinated collaborative initiatives and led the NHERI GSC Natural Hazard Data Challenge. Through these efforts, she has worked to connect students across institutions and disciplines, encouraging broader participation in natural hazards research. Parisa’s broader academic vision is shaped by her belief that science must reach beyond technical circles to make an impact. She is particularly motivated by challenges of risk communication, finding ways to translate scientific advances into tools that communities, policymakers, and the next generation can use to understand and prepare for natural hazards. As she often notes, “Research only fulfills its purpose when it helps people face real risks with better knowledge and stronger resilience.

Narayan Kumar is a Ph.D. candidate majoring in Coastal Engineering at the University of Delaware. His research focuses on numerical modeling of sediment transport and beach profile evolution, specifically through, a three-phase solver within the Open FOAM framework. He has been recognized with several fellowships, including the WEDA Fellowship 2023 and the Nicholas Kraus Coastal Scholar Award. Beyond research, Narayan serves as Treasurer of the Data Science Student Association and Parliamentarian of Graduate Student Government at the University of Delaware.

Anamika Malla is a PhD student majoring in Wind Science and Engineering in National Wind Institute at Texas Tech University. Her research focusses on fluid-structure interactions, specifically numerical investigation of tornado-like loads on low-rise buildings. Anamika’s research is twofold: numerical simulation through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and validation with experimental simulation of tornado-like loads. Anamika's group was the SimCenter winner at Computational Academy 2023 at UT, Austin.

Samir Nepal is currently pursuing a PhD in Urban and Regional Sciences at Texas A&M University, where he works with the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center (HRRC). His research focuses on quantifying hazard mitigation, resilience, and disaster recovery processes, particularly in contexts of multi-hazards where data and resources are limited. Professionally, he brings over 14 years of experience with international humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations and programs funded by USAID, UKAID (DFID), KOICA, JICA, AUSAID, and others. His portfolio spans disaster relief and response, short- and long-term recovery, climate change adaptation, food security, disaster governance, and emergency logistics. This extensive field engagement informs his current academic work, particularly in bridging the gap between operational practice and empirical research in disaster risk reduction and recovery planning. Having grown up in Nepal, he witnessed and directly experienced multiple disasters, including the 2008 Koshi Flood, the 2010 Jajarkot Epidemic, the 2015 Nepal Earthquake, the 2017 Terai Flood, and the COVID-19 pandemic. These events shaped his professional and academic trajectory, as he engaged both as a survivor of various disasters and as a first-hand responder, translating lived experiences into long-term commitments to disaster mitigation, resilience, and recovery for both research and practice. These experiences from the Global South bring a valuable perspective to the NHERI GSC, where he has been involved since 2023, contributing to a more diverse and enriched discourse. This background offers an added advantage in making the GSC forum more distinctive. Beyond his professional and academic endeavors, he lives with his mother, wife, and two children. He remains committed to advancing scholarship by engaging in the intellectual work of studying, researching, and producing new knowledge.

Safoura Safari is a third-year PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since Fall 2023, she has been a member of the Center for Disaster Resilience (CDR) at UMD. Her research focuses on transportation policy, with a particular emphasis on the equitable deployment of electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure. She also investigates the accessibility and usage patterns of EV charging stations during natural hazards, particularly flood events. Safoura holds a Master's degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a focus on Water Resources Management from the University of Tehran (2021), where her research centered on groundwater sustainability during droughts. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology in 2017, which provided her with a solid foundation in engineering and environmental sustainability. Beyond her academic achievements, Safoura has broader experiences in leadership roles. During her undergraduate studies, she served on the executive committee of the student guild council, where she helped organize key events, including health and food festivals, competitions, and graduation ceremonies. More recently, she served on the executive committee for the NHERI 2024 Summit at UMD. She was also awarded the NHERI Computational Academy 2024 travel grant held in Austin, Texas. Safoura has been an active member of NHERI GSC since February 2024, and is eager to continue her active involvement in NHERI GSC committee and contribute to efforts aimed at enhancing community preparedness and infrastructure resilience in response to natural hazards.

Burak Duran is a Ph.D. candidate in Civil Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, specializing in Bridge Engineering, Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), and AI-driven smart infrastructure technologies. His doctoral research focuses on developing deep learning and transfer learning methods for real-time bridge monitoring. He’s been working as a researcher in projects funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Transportation (DOT). By integrating artificial intelligence with full-scale bridge experiments, his work enables accurate damage detection, localization, and scalable knowledge transfer between different bridge types. Recognized as the 2025 recipient of the ASCE Fred and Tana Moses Bridge Engineering Fellowship, Burak combines advanced computational methods with practical bridge engineering expertise. He has contributed to projects involving full-scale bridge testing, live-load experimentation, and sensor-based data acquisition to improve infrastructure resilience. A Fulbright Scholar, Burak earned his M.Sc. in Civil Engineering with a concentration in Structural and Earthquake Engineering from the University at Buffalo. His academic journey has also included post-disaster reconnaissance following major earthquakes, where he studied structural failures and their societal impacts. He has authored multiple peer-reviewed journal papers, conference proceedings, and technical reports. Beyond research, Burak actively contributes to the professional community as Vice Treasurer of the NSF NHERI Graduate Student Council, and through memberships in ASCE, EERI, and the StEER network. His work advances both the technical frontier of bridge engineering and the broader mission of safer, smarter, and more resilient infrastructure systems.

Jordan Nakayama is a third-year doctoral student in Structural Engineering at Auburn University. Her research focuses on developing theory guided data science frameworks for learning from post-event windstorm reconnaissance data, bringing together her field reconnaissance experiences with her knowledge of structural engineering to holistically understand structural performance in windstorms. She has served as the Secretary of NHERI GSC since its inception in 2021, establishing precedence for the NHERI GSC communication and documentation. She has served as the Annual Report Chair for both of the NHERI GSC Annual Reports ('23 and '24). Passionate about the opportunities that NHERI GSC provides its members, she has attended many conferences through funding opportunities provided to her in her involvement in the NHERI GSC and presented/hosted NHERI GSC sessions at these conferences. Jordan is committed to furthering NHERI GSC's reach and impact through her leadership in the organization as she hopes to become the next President of the NHERI Graduate Student Council.

Diako Abbasi is a fourth-year PhD student in the Center for Disaster Resilience, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research examines the intersection of natural hazards, federal aid, and local capacity, with the goal of enhancing infrastructure resilience by encouraging local governments to invest in risk reduction. He also contributes to broader community resilience initiatives, including reducing prolonged school closures caused by natural disasters and improving the resilience and sustainability of EV charging station networks under hazard conditions. Diako has participated in several NHERI programs, including the NHERI Computational Academy at TACC and the NHERI Computational Symposium at UCLA, and he served on the executive committee for the NHERI Natural Hazards Research Summit at UMD. In addition to his academic work, he is the treasurer and secretary of the SRA Engineering and Infrastructure Specialty Group (EISG), where he supports collaboration and knowledge exchange among researchers and practitioners working on risk and resilience.

Utkuhan Genc is a Ph.D. student in Edwards on School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, advised by Professor David R. Johnson. His research focuses on incorporating community perspectives into disaster risk reduction strategies. He examines the impacts of natural hazards using applied social science and transportation research methods to develop decision-making tools that help communities respond to and recover from evolving challenges.

Alireza Mirghafouri is a Ph.D. candidate at the Coastal and Hydraulic Engineering Lab at Stony Brook University. He earned his M.Sc. in Hydraulic Structures and Water Engineering from the University of Tehran. His research focuses on experimental and numerical modeling of fluid-soil-structure interactions and tsunami-induced scour, in collaboration with the University of New Hampshire, the University of Delaware, and the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at Oregon State University. During his Ph.D., Alireza has mentored seven undergraduate students from five different universities and three high school students. He has also served as the Vice Chair of Workshops and Mentoring for the NSF NHERI Graduate Student Council and as a member of the organizing committee for the GSC Mini-Conference. Additionally, he led the experimental component of the 2024 NHERI Computational Academy at UT Austin, where his team won first place in the final competition. Building on his experience, Alireza is passionate about organizing webinars, workshops and mentorship initiatives to support students and early-career researchers in the field of natural hazards. He aims to create opportunities for them to connect with industry professionals and academic experts, helping them prepare for future careers and stay engaged with cutting-edge research and practical applications.

Rajee Tamrakar is a PhD student in Marine, Atmospheric and Sustainability Science at Stony Brook University. Her research interest focuses on disaster risk reduction, mitigation and management, and climate change adaptation, with a particular emphasis on enhancing the resilience of vulnerable communities. Her master’s research explored managed retreat as a mitigation strategy, analyzing the social, economic, and policy factors that influence the success or failure of community relocations in levee-protected areas along the Mississippi River. She is interested in developing proactive  equitable adaptation strategies and risk communication tool that bridge the gap between research and policy to support marginalized communities facing climate-induced hazards. Originally from Nepal, Rajee’s firsthand experiences with natural hazards like floods and earthquakes have fueled her passion for equitable disaster risk reduction and strengthened her commitment to community-centered resilience planning.

Pooria Mazaheri is currently doing his PhD in structural engineering and is a Research Assistant at Iowa State University. He brings a robust background in structural engineering with a focus on structural integrity management and risk assessment. His current work on an NSF-funded project targets enhancing the resilience of electric power networks under extreme weather conditions. With a deep understanding of the challenges in structural hazards and performance-based design, Pooria combines academic rigor with practical experience in mitigating natural hazards. His commitment to advancing infrastructure resilience against climate change and aging equips him uniquely to lead the Research Standing Committee, driving forward innovative research and collaboration within the natural hazards’ community. Pooria's career is marked by a commitment to advancing our infrastructure's robustness against the increasing threats of climate change and aging, making him an ideal candidate for the Chair of Research position. I am eager to bring my academic and practical experiences to the NHERI GSC, fostering groundbreaking research and collaboration initiatives. As Chair of Research for the NHERI GSC, Pooria is dedicated to supporting graduate researchers and building collaboration across disciplines to advance hazard resilience research.

Zul Kazeem is a third-year Ph.D. student at Case Western Reserve University whose research centers on advancing resilient and sustainable infrastructure systems. Her work combines surrogate physics simulations, large-scale data generation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to address critical challenges in infrastructure planning and performance. In addition to her core research, she investigates fire simulations and their impact on both urban and forest environments, focusing on how infrastructure design, vegetation patterns, and tree placement can be optimized to reduce the spread of fire and enhance community safety. In 2024, Zul was awarded the NHERI Computational Academy travel grant to attend the program in Austin, Texas, where her team tied for first place in the competition using physics-informed computational methods. Through her interdisciplinary approach, she collaborates across engineering, environmental modeling, and data science to develop strategies that strengthen infrastructure systems against both natural and human-made hazards. She aspires to translate her research into practical solutions that help communities build safer, smarter, and more resilient infrastructure for the future.

Matthew Van is a fifth year PhD student in the University of Delaware’s disaster science and management program and a graduate assistant at the Disaster Research Center there. His current focus centers on the impacts of social isolation and loneliness on the disaster preparedness of older adults, as well as the history of the centers and people conducting disaster research. For the last four years Matthew has gotten to know a diverse range of disaster researchers and emergency management professionals alike through numerous spaces such as the Natural Hazards Workshop, the FEMA Higher Education Symposium, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Academies of Sciences, and the American Geophysical Union. He would like to use his familiarity with different research centers and these spaces to help connect students not just with potential collaborators but also with new ideas and disciplines that may prove fruitful for further understanding our knowledge of hazards and disasters while making no pretensions to being able to understand many of the advanced underlying calculations required. Matthew’s interest in social connectivity and recognition of the challenges faced by many graduate students explains his interest in this role on the NHERI GSC to foster a supportive student community to follow up the successful efforts of the preceding networking and community chairs.

Estovio Timothy is a graduate student in Structural Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, pursuing his second master’s degree, and a Research Fellow at Peking University (China) with prior exchange experience at Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (Italy). He previously completed an accelerated B.Sc./M.Sc. fast-track program at Bandung Institute of Technology (Indonesia) with honors and is an awardee of the MIT Data, Economics, and Design of Policy program. His research centers on wind engineering and multi-hazard resilience: he led the development of Indonesia’s first national wind hazard map, contributed to revisions of the building code (SNI 1727) in alignment with ASCE 7, and carried out pioneering reconnaissance and fragility studies of Indonesia’s first tornado in the equatorial region. His theses advanced performance-based seismic and wind design (PBSD and PBWD) for supertall buildings, including generating artificial time-history wind loads with inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT). Professionally, Estovio has worked on landmark projects across Asia, Africa, and Australia, including the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere (385 m in Jakarta) and an 85-story tower studied through PBWD. He has delivered professional training in structural dynamics to more than 150 engineers in Australia and served as a teaching assistant for over 800 students at Bandung Institute of Technology (Indonesia) and Peking University (China). He is also an active member of IStructE (UK), IIFC (UK), FEMA, ASTM, ASME, ASCE, AISC, AIAA, and ACI. Through NSF NHERI GSC, he hopes to contribute by supporting membership activities, facilitating outreach, and strengthening connections among graduate students while advancing hazard engineering research and bridging academic knowledge with real-world engineering practice.

Sadegh Nouri is a PhD candidate at the Center for Applied Coastal Research, University of Delaware. His research focuses on coastal hazards, including tsunamis, scour, and nearshore hydrodynamics, with an emphasis on integrating machine learning into coastal engineering. He holds a Master of Science in Coastal Engineering from the University of Tehran, where he also received his bachelor’s degree. Sadegh has authored several publications in top journals, covering topics like tsunami hazard assessments and digital twin applications for stormwater systems. He has expertise in CFD modeling and solver development and has actively contributed to research collaborations, teaching, and student mentorship.

Mohamed Hassan is a doctoral candidate in Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, specializing in coastal geotechnics and root–soil interaction analysis. His research integrates advanced imaging methods with machine learning, and laboratory and field shear strength testing to advance the understanding of root–soil interactions in coastal wetlands. His goal is to improve predictions of soil stability, enhance coastal resilience, and address critical environmental challenges. In addition to his academic work, Mohamed brings over six years of professional geotechnical engineering experience, having contributed to major international infrastructure projects including the Cairo Monorail and the rehabilitation of the Old Aswan Dam. These roles sharpened his expertise in soil mechanics and foundation design, while his current research bridges applied engineering practice with cutting-edge science in natural hazard engineering. Mohamed has also demonstrated strong leadership in research through multiple funded projects. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of a grant awarded at Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), and he serves as Co-PI on two Department of Energy EMSL projects and one National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. These accomplishments highlight his ability to secure competitive funding, lead interdisciplinary teams, and deliver impactful research outcomes. As the Geotechnical Engineering RSR of the NHERI Graduate Student Council, Mohamed aims to strengthen research collaboration within the NHERI community, promote innovation across disciplines, and advocate for graduate student researchers pursuing transformative solutions in natural hazard engineering.

Mohammad Movahedi is a Civil Engineering Ph.D. candidate at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, Florida State University, whose work sits at the intersection of infrastructure resilience, artificial intelligence, simulation, and disaster management. He integrates advanced AI, simulation modeling, geospatial analytics, and infrastructure planning to create next-generation decision-support systems for disaster response and post-disruption recovery. His innovative tools are designed to predict infrastructure performance, optimize resource allocation, and ultimately reshape how communities prepare for and respond to extreme weather events and other large-scale hazards.

Najiba Rashid is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography and Geospatial Science at Oregon State University. Her research focuses on disaster resilience and geospatial analysis, combining spatial modeling, and community-based methods to better understand how hazards impact vulnerable populations. She works in Cascadia CoPes Hub where her focus is on hurricane and Tsunami debris management and also worked on projects addressing heat stress and air quality in Puget Sound, seeking to bridge the gap between scientific research and practical disaster planning. She has been actively engaged in organizing workshops and seminars, including the Pacific Northwest Water Symposium and the Radical Earth Science Equity Transformations (RESET) seminar series, creating platforms for dialogue on natural hazards, resilience, and equity in environmental research at Oregon State University. In her free time, she enjoys reading books and spending time on hiking trails.

Arezoo Bakhshizadeh is a PhD student at Florida State University specializing in wind engineering. In her PhD research, Arezoo focuses on developing an AI-integrated wind tunnel framework that enhances the adaptability and predictive accuracy of wind tunnel experiments. By implementing real-time adaptive experimentation, the system autonomously adjusts parameters to simulate complex, real-world wind conditions more accurately. As a member of NHERI, Arezoo is passionate about contributing to the wind engineering community, advancing research, and fostering collaboration between academia and industry.