Rate My Professor Hiba Baroud

Hiba Baroud is an associate professor and the associate chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in Vanderbilt University’s School of Engineering. A. James and Alice B. Clark Foundation Faculty Fellow, she holds secondary appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. She serves as interim director of the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy, and Climate, and deputy director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. Baroud earned her Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Oklahoma, M.Math. from the University of Waterloo, and B.S. from Notre Dame University-Louaize. Prior to Vanderbilt, where she joined as an assistant professor in 2015, her doctoral research focused on network resilience.

Baroud’s research integrates data analytics, risk analysis, and resilience modeling to evaluate critical infrastructure performance during disasters. Her group develops statistical learning, network modeling, and decision analysis methods to address uncertain interdependencies across infrastructure, human, and environmental systems. Focus areas include security, resilience, and sustainability of sectors such as transportation, energy, and water amid natural hazards, climate change, and cascading disruptions. Applications span smart cities, developing countries, and Arctic communities. She co-chairs the Risk and Resilience Measurements Committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Resilience Division and serves as Associate Editor for ASCE Natural Hazards Review. Major awards include the NSF Faculty Early CAREER Award (2020), Global Voices Fellowship (2019), National Academy of Sciences Arab-American Frontiers Fellowship (2022), Global Young Academy membership (2023), International Science Council Fellowship (2024), and Society for Risk Analysis Chauncey Starr Distinguished Young Scholar Award (2024). Key publications are “Importance measures for inland waterway network resilience” (Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2014), “Stochastic measures of network resilience: Applications to waterway commodity flows” (Risk Analysis, 2014), “Inherent costs and interdependent impacts of infrastructure network resilience” (Risk Analysis, 2015), and “Selecting indicators for assessing community sustainable resilience” (Risk Analysis, 2019). Her contributions enhance risk-informed strategies for resilient infrastructure.