November 18, 2019

Recent Alumni Participate in MIT Rising Stars Workshop

Three recent CEE PhD graduates recently participated in MIT’s Rising Stars in Civil and Environmental Engineering workshop, a competitive program the brings 20 women together to prepare them for careers in academia and as leaders in civil and environmental engineering.

Mahnoush Babaei (PhD ‘19) is currently doing postdoctoral research in Mechanical Engineering. She completed her PhD research under the supervision of Professor Kaushik Dayal. Her thesis work examined using structural instabilities to generate high power and work densities in heat- and photo-mechanically active thin liquid crystal polymeric films using nonlinear finite element models.

Kelly Good (PhD ‘19) is currently a visiting assistant professor at Villanova University. While at CMU she was advised by Professor Jeanne VanBriesen where she researched the interactions of water systems with other infrastructure systems and the resulting effects on the environment and health. Most recently, she was named a 2019 Siebel Scholar in Energy Science in recognition for her work on understanding the effects of power plant bromide discharges on drinking water sources.

Susu Xu (PhD ‘19) is currently engaged as a research scientist at Qualcomm AI research. Her PhD research focused on sensing and learning in smart urban infrastructure systems, from bottom layers such as sensing system optimization and machine learning algorithm development to real-world applications such as city-scale air pollution monitoring and earthquake-induced infrastructure health monitoring.