Dr. Pegah Farshadmanesh, Research Associate in the Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA) Research Laboratory, has been awarded the Zonta International Women in Technology District Scholarship.
The Zonta International Women in Technology scholarship aims to increase opportunities for women to become future leaders in technology. Zonta International provides funding to protect and empower women globally through education, health care, and economic opportunities.
Since 2017, Farshadmanesh has been involved in projects vital to the work of the SoTeRiA Research Laboratory, directed by NPRE Prof. Zahra Mohaghegh, a Zonta Amelia Earhart Fellow Alumna. SoTeRiA Laboratory is advancing Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) for conventional nuclear power plants and advanced reactors, pioneering three key areas of scholarly development:
- spatiotemporal coupling of physical failure mechanisms with human/social performance to generate the dynamic-static Integrated PRA (I-PRA),
- incorporating big data analytics into PRA, and
- integrating safety risk with financial risk.
These three areas have been realized in several research projects and in more than 60 publications (https://soteria.npre.illinois.edu/publications/). The ongoing research projects on:
- advancing I-PRA for the deployment of new technologies, funded by the Department of Energy (DOE);
- organizational risk analysis, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF);
- systematic enterprise risk management for utilities, funded by DOE;
- probabilistic physics of failure analysis for advanced water cooled reactors, supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA);
- advancing fire PRA, and the risk-informed resolution of Generic Safety Issue, led by the nuclear industry
can be found on the SoTeRiA Lab website: http://soteria.npre.illinois.edu/research/.