Baroud recognized by Society for Risk Analysis with distinguished young scholar award

Hiba Baroud, A. James and Alice B. Clark Foundation Faculty Fellow and associate chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the Chauncey Starr Distinguished Young Risk Analyst Award at the Society for Risk Analysis 2024 annual meeting’s awards luncheon on Dec. 10.

The Chauncey Starr Distinguished Young Risk Analyst Award is awarded to any SRA member age 40 or younger for outstanding achievement in science or public policy relating to risk analysis and exceptional promise for continued contributions to risk analysis. Starr was a pioneer in the fields of nuclear energy and risk analysis.

Hiba Baroud (left) accepts the Chauncey Starr Distinguished Young Risk Analyst Award from SRA President Felicia Wu, John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Food Safety, Toxicology, and Risk Assessment at Michigan State University.

Baroud is the Interim Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy, and Climate and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Risk science provides guidance for how to characterize risk. Through risk assessment, risk perception and communication, risk management and governance, and problem solving, risk science contributes to the development of effective tools and methods that can improve communication of risk information to citizens, lawmakers, media and interest groups.

Baroud’s work explores data analytics and statistical methods to measure and analyze the risk, reliability, and resilience in critical infrastructure systems. Her interdisciplinary research investigates network interdependencies across infrastructure, environmental, and social systems with a focus on applications in disaster management and climate adaptation.

Baroud is a fellow of the International Science Council in recognition of outstanding contributions to promoting science as a global public good and a member of the Global Young Academy where she serves on the Executive Committee and has previously co-led the Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction Working Group.

Baroud received an NSF Faculty Early CAREER Development grant in 2020. She was the recipient of the inaugural Littlejohn Dean’s Faculty Fellowship, an endowed fellowship for junior faculty members, and was in the first cohort of the Chancellor’s Global Voices Fellowship, a semester-long program designed to expand Vanderbilt’s global reach by amplifying the impact of faculty academic research. She joined the Vanderbilt School of Engineering in 2015.

Rajesh Kandel, a civil and environmental engineering Ph.D. student and graduate research assistant in Baroud’s group, received a Decision Analysis and Risk Specialty Group Student Merit Award for his presentation “Cascaded classifiers with XGBoost models to improve the prediction of Arctic maritime incidents.” Kandel’s research focuses on risk analysis of Arctic maritime shipping using machine learning methods and uncertainty quantification techniques.

Contact brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu