The ASCE EMI Objective Resilience Committee (ORC), in collaboration with the Durham School Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, hosted Dr. Alice Alipour of Iowa State University on April 24, 2026, for an invited seminar on infrastructure resilience and power grid performance under extreme wind events.
Dr. Alice Alipour presented From Structural Response to System Resilience: Multi-Scale Mechanics of Power Grids under Wind Events to approximately 150 attendees, both in person and virtually. Her lecture examined how localized physical failures in power grid components can propagate through interconnected systems, creating broader outage and cascading failure risks. The presentation highlighted the importance of linking structural mechanics, probabilistic hazard modeling, and power system reliability analysis to support risk-informed planning for climate-exposed infrastructure.
The visit included a full day of technical exchange across UNL’s Omaha and Lincoln campuses. Dr. Alipour met with the SiRIUS Lab and delivered the ORC seminar.
Dr. Alipour is the Thomas Murray Faculty Fellow in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on resilience of civil infrastructure systems under multi-hazard conditions, with emphasis on probabilistic modeling, decision-making frameworks, and component-to-system performance assessment.
The seminar reflects ORC’s continuing mission to connect researchers, practitioners, students, and professional communities around objective resilience methods for civil infrastructure. A recording of the seminar will be made available through the ORC website.