SoTeRiA scientist chosen for The Rising Stars Women in Engineering Workshop

Dr. Pegah Farshadmanesh, postdoctoral research associate in the Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA) Research Laboratory, was selected to attend the Asian Deans’ Forum 2019 – The Rising Stars Women in Engineering Workshop, held in late October in South Korea.

The workshop, which Seoul National University hosted and several top Asian universities organized, brought together young female engineering professionals from around the world to highlight scientific and career-oriented topics for the next generation of women academic leaders. The highly competitive workshop drew several hundred applicants.

Since 2017 Farshadmanesh has been involved in projects vital to the work of the SoTeRiA Research Laboratory, which NPRE Prof. Zahra Mohaghegh directs:

• Farshadmanesh led the improvement of a screening process for seismic Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) using the Risk-Informed over Deterministic (RoverD) method.
• She contributed to the development of the Integrated Risk-Informed Design (I-RID) approach for the prioritization of design alternatives that consider both cost and risk, as well as the development of a theory-based framework for Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) of nuclear power plants.
• Dr. Farshadmanesh has collaborated with a multidisciplinary team of students and professors on the development of the big-data theoretic approach, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), for quantifying the influence of organizational factors on technological system risk.

For more details on these research projects, please visit https://soteria.npre.illinois.edu/publications/.

The SoTeRiA Research Laboratory in NPRE advances PRA for conventional nuclear power plants and advanced reactors by explicitly incorporating the underlying science of accident causation into risk scenarios. PRA is a key pillar of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s risk-informed regulatory framework. Following the NRC’s lead, a growing number of governmental agencies in the U.S. are using PRA for policy setting.

The SoTeRiA Research Laboratory has integrated classical PRA with simulation-based methods equipped with uncertainty quantification, contributing to the development of a “spatiotemporal” PRA. For more information on the ongoing research of the SoTeRiA Laboratory, please visit http://soteria.npre.illinois.edu.