ASCE has honored Ali Mostafavi, Ph.D., Aff.M.ASCE, with the 2023 Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction for his exceptional leadership in establishing an outstanding research program that pioneers theories and practices of civil infrastructure resilience management to extreme weather events through advancing the state-of-the-art in data-driven methods and computational modeling techniques.
Mostafavi has built a world-class research program that advances fundamental knowledge and analytical tools needed to support resilience in infrastructure systems. He is the principal investigator of the Urban Resilience Lab at Texas A&M. His research integrates advanced machine learning and complex systems-based computational modeling into infrastructure resilience assessments to capture interdependencies among infrastructure systems, as well as human-infrastructure interactions during extreme events. Through the use of these novel computational approaches, he is forging new research directions in the field of infrastructure resilience to promote data-driven methods and explore equitable resilience practice.
His research has shaped the field in important ways, including harnessing community-scale big data and their use in machine learning models for predicting infrastructure and community vulnerability and recovery during crises, rethinking the extent of spatial and temporal interdependencies among different infrastructure systems subjected to natural hazards, and re-envisioning how infrastructure resilience assessments could better consider social equality. His research results enable translating hazard scenarios into determining risks to physical infrastructure, predicting failure cascades across infrastructure networks, and determining societal impacts (such as loss of access to critical facilities). From this work, he is pioneering new insights into how construction engineers can lead in the area of resilient infrastructure to extreme events.
The Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding scholarship that advances construction engineering as a science.
