Bio

Mirna 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)

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