Pegah Farshadmanesh is a research scientist in the Socio-Technical Risk Analysis Research Laboratory in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD in May 2017 from the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at Illinois Tech. She also has nine years of structural engineering experience, working on numerous diverse projects, including the design of hydraulic structures, such as water treatment facilities. Farshadmanesh has conducted interdisciplinary research that crosses boundaries between various engineering disciplines (e.g., civil, nuclear, and systems engineering), computational sciences, and social sciences.
Farshadmanesh’s research focuses on the influence of human and organizational factors on the impacts of natural and technological hazards and spans three main areas: Area I: Assessing risk associated with compounding and cascading hazards; Area II: Developing causal models of social and technological systems and their couplings, as well as their integration into risk models, and Area III: Integrating advanced techniques (e.g., machine learning) to discover the underlying causal factors and developing digital twins for improving risk-informed decision-making under uncertainty. Farshadmanesh is the recipient of the 2019 Zonta International Women in Technology District award and an Outstanding Reviewer Award from the ASCE Practice Periodical on Structural Design and Construction journal. Farshadmanesh was also selected as a participant for the 2019 Rising Stars Women in Engineering Workshop in South Korea and the STEM Faculty Launch Program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2019.