Stanford University
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Mirna Kassem
Acting Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioMirna Kassem will join Stanford Civil & Environmental Engineering as an Assistant Professor in Summer 2027. Her research focuses on advancing the characterization, assessment, and mitigation of cascading natural hazards through data-informed computational frameworks that integrate physics-based modeling with state-of-the-art sensing and monitoring technologies.
Mirna's research group will investigate how cascading hazards, including wildfires, rainfall- and earthquake-induced landslides, debris flows, landslide damming, and subsequent flooding, interact across the natural and built environments. Her overarching goal is to develop scalable, performance-based approaches that quantify current and future climate-driven hazards, evaluate their impacts on communities, infrastructure, and critical lifelines, and support risk-informed mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Mirna is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of the NSF-funded Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH). She is a recipient of the 2025 Jane Lewis Fellowship, the 2022 Harry Bolton Seed Award, the 2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, the 2021 Youssef M. Salam Civil Engineering Excellence Award, and the 2021 Mohamad Ali Safieddine Endowed Award for Academic Excellence.
Education:
PhD, University of California, Berkeley, GeoSystems Engineering (2026)
MS, University of California, Berkeley, GeoSystems Engineering (2022)
BE, American University of Beirut, Civil & Environmental Engineering (2021) -
Riitta Katila
W.M. Keck Professor and Professor of Management Science and Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe question that drives Prof. Katila's research is how technology-based firms with significant resources can stay innovative. Her work lies at the intersection of the fields of technology, innovation, and strategy and focuses on strategies that enable organizations to discover, develop and commercialize technologies. She combines theory with longitudinal large-sample data (e.g., robotics, biomedical, platform and multi-industry datasets), background fieldwork, and state-of-the-art quantitative methods. The ultimate objective is to understand what makes technology-based firms successful.
To answer this question, Prof. Katila conducts two interrelated streams of research. She studies (1) strategies that help firms leverage their existing resources (leverage stream), and (2) strategies through which firms can acquire new resources (acquisition stream) to create innovation. Her early contributions were firm centric while recent contributions focus on innovation in the context of competitive interaction and ecosystems.
Professor Katila's work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Strategy Science, Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy and other outlets. In her work, supported by the National Science Foundation, Katila examines how firms create new products successfully. Focusing on the robotics and medical device industries, she investigates how different search approaches, such as the exploitation of existing knowledge and the exploration for new knowledge, influence the kinds of new products that technology-intensive firms introduce.
