Dr. Ali Mostafavi, Zachry Career Development Associate Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University, won the 2023 Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
The Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction was established to recognize individuals with outstanding scholarship that advances construction engineering as a science. It was named in honor of Dr. Daniel W. Halpin, a distinguished member of ASCE, who is recognized as one of the leading authorities in the world on the use of simulation in studying construction processes.
Mostafavi was awarded for his "exceptional leadership in establishing an outstanding research program that pioneers theories and practices of civil infrastructure resilience management to extreme weather events through advancing the state of the art in data-driven methods and computational modeling techniques."
Mostafavi will present the plenary Halpin Award Lecture at the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering Conference in June 2023.
"I feel very humbled and truly honored to receive this award from ASCE named after Professor Dan Halpin. Professor Halpin is one of the world-renowned pioneers in creating system models and computational simulation in civil engineering systems," he said. "Reading his work ignited my interest in computational simulation and systems modeling in civil engineering when I was an undergraduate student. In fact, Professor Halpin's research was very influential in my decision to pursue my Ph.D. studies at Purdue University."
Mostafavi's interdisciplinary research is positioned at the intersection of urban resilience, network and complex systems, urban computing, disaster informatics and applied artificial intelligence. His research investigates the network dynamics of communities in response to stressors such as sea level rise and natural disasters using systems analytics, AI and complex network models. He works closely with community partners to extend the broader impacts of his research.
Mostafavi is a fellow of the Institute for Disaster Resilient Texas, the Institute for Science, Technology and Public Policy, and the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. Since 2021, he has been on the Stanford/Elsevier list of the top 2% of scholars in the world based on annual impact. He has received several awards and honors, including an Early-Career Research Fellowship from the National Academies' Gulf Research Program and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a member of the ASCE Infrastructure Resilience Division, an associate editor of the ASCE Natural Hazard Review and an editorial board member of the ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering and Journal of Infrastructure Systems.