Invited Seminar by Prof. Maria Koliou

Abstract: The frequency of natural hazards increases in the United States and worldwide, where communities suffer from direct economic impacts and long recovery periods. To address those consequences, community-level resilience studies are needed to evaluate the post-disaster recovery of various systems within a community and evaluate pre- and post-disaster mitigation policies. This presentation will showcase the advancement of community-level simulations by developing digital twins and agent-based models that can quantify communities' recovery processes and resilience. Results will be presented for communities subjected to weather-induced hazards (hurricanes and tornadoes). Both proposed models have the potential to revolutionize community resilience planning and enable community stakeholders and decision-makers to assess mitigation strategies for enhancing community recovery and resilience.

Brief Bio: Dr. 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 is also currently a Visiting Professor at the School of Civil Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. Her 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. She is developing novel resilient structural designs and systems against natural hazards and formulating fundamental mathematical frameworks to assess risk-based system functionality and community resilience. 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. Dr. Koliou 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).