Quick Info

Current Position: 

• Assistant Professor 

Risk, Reliability, and Resiliency Characterization (R3C) Laboratory

Department of Systems Engineering, 

Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering

Colorado State University

Education:

• Ph.D. Reliability Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park (2023)

  • • Advisor: Dr. Katrina Groth

    • Dissertation Title: Improving the Foundational Knowledge of Dependency in Human Reliability Analysis

• M.S. Reliability Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park (2022)

• B.S. Nuclear and Radiological Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology (2017)

  • • Minor in Mathematics

Research Interests:

• Human reliability analysis (HRA)

  • Dependency in HRA

  • Human factors connection to HRA

• Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA)

  • Multi-unit PRA

  • External Hazards PRA (XHPRA)

• Nuclear safety engineering

• Data Analytics

  • Sparse data analysis techniques

  • Bayesian methods for data augmentation

• Engineering ethics and safety nexus

  • Ethical bases for risk analysis

  • Equity in risk analysis

Personal Interests:

• Running - trails, road or track (in that order)

• Music - campfire guitar, mostly appalachian folk and country

• Politics and Economics - specifically on issues of equality and equity

My Background

I was born and raised in the Piedmont area of Georgia, where I attended the Georgia Institute of Technology (fellow Georgia Tech graduates, what's the good word?) for my Bachelors of Science in Nuclear and Radiological Engineering with a Minor in Mathematics. As a student at Georgia Tech, I gained industry experience interning with Sila Nanotechnologies and Southern Nuclear Operating Company and research experience working with the Fusion Research Center. 

After graduating with High Honors in 2017, I worked for the U.S. Department of Navy as a Nuclear Test Engineer for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard from 2017 to 2019. As a nuclear engineer, I developed and revised maintenance and testing procedures for primary system components onboard naval nuclear submarines. I helped to devise engineered solutions to emergent maintenance issues and worked with the Training Department to give lectures on the fundamentals of nuclear and electrical engineering. 

In 2019, I felt ready to continue my education and was admitted to the University of Maryland, College Park to pursue a Ph.D. in Reliability Engineering, working in the Systems Risk and Reliability Analysis (SyRRA) Lab in the Center for Risk and Reliability (CRR). My research at UMD focused on addressing foundational technical gaps in human reliability analysis: how human actions and decisions influence (i.e., are dependent) on each other and on the situational context. I developed a Bayesian Network-based, causal approach to HRA dependency that conceptualizes dependency as a causal relationship between any HRA variables. I was very fortunate to share my knowledge with many students as a Teaching Assistant at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. 

I defended my Ph.D. in April 2023, and started as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado in July 2023.