Saba Faghirnejad

Saba Faghirnejad is a PhD Candidate in civil engineering at the University of Kansas and a graduate research assistant in the Disaster Housing, Organizations, and Prevention strategies for Everyone Lab. Her research focuses on integrating human behavior into infrastructure, planning to improve shelter access and community resilience during tornadoes hazards.

Her work combines household survey data, geographic information systems, statistical analysis, and agent-based modeling to examine how individuals and households make protective decisions during tornado events and how those decisions interact with infrastructure accessibility. She is particularly interested in understanding the social, behavioral, and structural factors that influence sheltering actions under time-sensitive warning conditions.

Faghirnejad’s current research investigates tornado shelter accessibility across Kansas communities and explores strategies for reducing vulnerability among at-risk populations. Through interdisciplinary approaches that integrate engineering, social science, and computational modeling, she seeks to support more effective disaster mitigation, preparedness, and resilience planning.

Prior to her doctoral studies, her research focused on structural and earthquake engineering, including performance-based design and optimization of structures subjected to extreme loads. She has presented her research at national and international conferences and was awarded Second Place at the 2026 Capitol Graduate Research Summit for her work on tornado shelter accessibility. Her long-term goal is to develop decision-support tools that help emergency managers, planners, and policymakers design safer, more equitable, and more resilient communities.