Dr. Pegah Farshadmanesh

Research Associate

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Pegah Farshadmanesh is currently a Research Associate with the Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA) Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (UIUC). She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her research during Ph.D. focused on estimating the risk of fires caused by earthquakes. To this end, she developed an innovative risk model to improve the fidelity of fire risk estimation for areas with insufficient historical post-earthquake fire data. Pegah’s professional desire is to improve the safety of infrastructure to withstand natural hazards and to develop technologies to mitigate the impact of natural hazards on the public and the environment. Pegah’s current research focuses on evaluating the impact of natural hazards, such as earthquakes and tornados, on nuclear power plants and the influence of human and organizational factors on risk and reliability of complex systems.

New Directions in Post-Earthquake Fire Hazard Analysis with Applications to Midwestern United States

estimating the risk of fires following earthquakes by applying risk quantification and analysis methodologies to infrastructure performance during earthquakes. The developed model, which I implemented as a Visual Basic program, utilizes the large National Fire Incident Reporting System data set and structural fragility curves from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hazus model. I utilized ArcGIS to visualize and analyze the geospatial distribution of historical post-earthquake fires and to validate the risk of fire following earthquake predicted from the analytical model against these historical observations.