Hiba Baroud

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Vanderbilt University

Nashville TN

Expert in risk, reliability and resilience of critical infrastructure against climate change and natural disasters, particularly flooding.

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Spotlight

Sep 14, 2021

1 min

Infrastructure and extreme weather expert on recent weather events

Hiba Baroud, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, is available for commentary on recent extreme weather events, including hurricanes, tropical storms and flooding. Baroud is an expert on infrastructure and climate change as they pertain to extreme weather events. She can speak to the potential dangers of the destruction and the cleanup decisions affected areas must make, including those that can help prepare for the future. Topics she can discuss include: How weathers and disasters are becoming more frequent and intense, therefore costing us more. Why cities must prepare before extreme weather hits, making future-based predictions and not just relying on historical data to understand potential concerns. With that, cities must also focus on restoration after an event happens, rather than prevention Additional dangers to residents' lives to be considered once the weather has passed such as a lack of food and water, lack of power and road infrastructure issues

Biography

Dr. Hiba Baroud is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Littlejohn Dean's Faculty Fellow. Her work explores data analytics and statistical methods to measure and analyze the risk, reliability, and resilience in critical infrastructure systems. In particular, she has studied data-driven Bayesian methods to predict the occurrence of disruptive events in infrastructure systems and stochastically model the recovery process of the physically disrupted system as well as other interdependent and indirectly impacted systems. She also developed decision analysis tools to assess different preparedness and recovery investment strategies for the protection of civil infrastructures.

Baroud holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Oklahoma. She has a Master of Mathematics from the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo where she focused in her research on the application of statistics, particularly time series models, to analyze Dr. Hiba Baroud is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Littlejohn Dean's Faculty Fellow. Her work explores data analytics and statistical methods to measure and analyze the risk, reliability, and resilience in critical infrastructure systems. In particular, she has studied data-driven Bayesian methods to predict the occurrence of disruptive events in infrastructure systems and stochastically model the recovery process of the physically disrupted system as well as other interdependent and indirectly impacted systems. She also developed decision analysis tools to assess different preparedness and recovery investment strategies for the protection of civil infrastructures.

Dr. Baroud holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Oklahoma. She has a Master of Mathematics from the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo where she focused in her research on the application of statistics, particularly time series models, to analyze financial data. Prior to that, she obtained her B.S. in Actuarial Science from Notre Dame University, Lebanon.

Areas of Expertise

Climate Change

Flood Mitigation

Natural Disasters

Resilience Modeling

Interdependent Systems Data Analytics

Critical Infrastructure Modeling

Risk Analysis

Risk-informed decision analysis

Statistical Modeling

Climate and Climate Change

Disaster Recovery

Flooding

Accomplishments

Fall 2019 Chancellor's Public Voices Fellow

A semester-long program designed to expand Vanderbilt University’s global reach by amplifying the impact of faculty academic research.

Best Paper Award in the Homeland Security Track

Best Paper Award in the Homeland Security Track of the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference.

Student Merit Award

Engineering and Infrastructure Specialty Group of the Society for Risk Analysis

Education

University of Oklahoma

Ph.D.

University of Waterloo

M.Math.

Notre Dame University

B.S.

Affiliations

American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
Society for Risk Analysis (SRA)
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
Institute for Industrial Engineers (IIE)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

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Selected Media Appearances

Dams in distress: Partial failure in Minnesota offers a nationwide warning

NBC News online

2024-06-29

Hiba Baroud, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University, said the Rapidan’s partial failure, among others, should prompt lawmakers to take a hard look at how to bolster dam infrastructure and triage repairs.

“We really need to think proactively to project potential scenarios for all the dams in the U.S. and start prioritizing which dams need to be rehabilitated or upgraded to avoid a situation like this,” she said, “as opposed to witnessing a big event and using it as a wake-up call about this particular dam.”

How the Midwest Floods Nearly Took Out a Century-Old Dam

The New York Times online

2024-06-25

“It’s the perfect storm, because we are dealing with more severe extreme weather events, and because it’s just the nature of time these dams are getting older,” said Hiba Baroud, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University.

Nigeria was already facing a food crisis – then flooding hit

The Telegraph online

2022-10-25

Hiba Baroud, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University, said: “[Food insecurity] is already an existing problem and so having the floodwater submerge all this farmland will lead to a major loss of food production for this season and also for future seasons.

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Selected Articles

Selecting indicators for assessing community sustainable resilience

Risk Analysis

Leslie Gillespie‐Marthaler, Katherine Nelson, Hiba Baroud, Mark Abkowitz

2019

"Communities are complex systems subject to a variety of hazards that can result in significant disruption to critical functions. Community resilience assessment is rapidly gaining popularity as a means to help communities better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruption."

A Bayesian kernel approach to modeling resilience-based network component importance

Elsevier

Hiba Baroud and Kash Barker

2018

"The resilience of infrastructure networks is an increasingly important consideration in infrastructure planning and risk management. One aspect of resilience-based planning is determining which components in the network are most important to the resilience of the network."

Static and Dynamic Resource Allocation Models for Recovery of Interdependent Systems: Application to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Annals of Operations Research

MacKenzie, C. A., Baroud, H., & Barker, K.

2016

"Determining where and when to invest resources during and after a disruption can challenge policy makers and homeland security officials. Two decision models, one static and one dynamic, are proposed to determine the optimal resource allocation to facilitate the recovery of impacted industries after a disruption where the objective is to minimize the production losses due to the disruption."