Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized nearly every field it has touched and Dr. Stephanie Paal works to wield that power in the civil engineering field.
Paal received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation — one of the most prestigious awards for up-and-coming researchers. The grant provides funding to support promising integrated research and education projects.
Paal is using the CAREER Award to leverage existing knowledge and AI to understand the performance of civil infrastructure under extreme loads such as natural or humanmade disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes or fires.
Innovations in new materials and structural design are being created to respond to these extreme situations. There is a need for a rapid and reliable approach to understand the behavior of existing and new structures in light of these innovations.
“The integrated research and educational plan aims toward a more intelligent and informed approach to design, analysis and evaluation of our built world in the face of disasters and response to the ever-changing technological landscape,” she said. “Moreover, although AI-based approaches are very promising right now, my integrated plan will focus on determining when and to what extent these approaches are suitable within the applied science domains.”
Paal takes a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to education and outreach, which is integral to the research plan, called STEM in Motion.
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