Engineering

"I remember daycare trips to coastal parks, and for most of my childhood I fell asleep at night to a sound machine playing the sound of breaking waves. My parents are geologists who really enjoy nature, so we spent a lot of time outdoors. Most families have family portraits hanging on the walls, but we had vials of sand samples clustered along ours."

Pioneering epidemiology project WastewaterSCAN has added parainfluenza, rotavirus, adenovirus group F, enterovirus D68, Candida auris, and hepatitis A to the list of infectious diseases it can monitor for public health.

"As a kid I would go to construction sites with my dad, a civil engineer, and he’d show me plans for putting reinforcement inside concrete columns. Together, we would count that the right amount of steel was there to protect a structure."

"I mostly study earthquakes and wave loading conditions, but climate change is driving more disastrous hurricanes, increased flooding, and catastrophic wildfires, all of which increase the risk to our civil infrastructure."