PNNL

Samrat (Sam) Chatterjee, a chief data scientist and team leader at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), has won the 2026 Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) Outstanding Risk Analysis Practitioner Award. This award, given annually to an SRA member, recognizes outstanding career-long accomplishments in risk analysis practice including scientific impact, leadership, and service to the risk analysis community. Chatterjee will formally receive the award at the 2026 SRA Annual Meeting this December in Atlanta.

“I’m deeply honored and grateful for this recognition from SRA,” said Chatterjee. “Risk science has evolved over the years and is particularly relevant now in the autonomous agents and machine intelligence era. I’m incredibly thankful to all for supporting my research and feel truly fortunate to collaborate with inspiring mentors, colleagues, and students. This award holds special significance for me, since it comes from the scientific society that I consider a professional home.”

SRA is a “multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, scholarly, international society that provides an open forum for all those who are interested in risk analysis.” Risk analysis includes a range of risk-related research, including risk assessment, risk characterization, risk communication, risk management, and policy relating to risk. SRA members include professionals from academia, government, industry, consulting, and nongovernmental organizations, encompassing a wide spectrum of perspectives on risk analysis. Beyond the larger organization, SRA incorporates numerous regional organizations globally and also includes specialty groups across multiple disciplines and domain areas. SRA’s flagship journal, Risk Analysis: An International Journal, is the leading scholarly journal in the field of risk analysis.

Chatterjee’s research contributions to the field of risk analysis over the past 15 years have led to numerous peer-reviewed publications in leading risk, critical infrastructure engineering, data science, and machine learning venues. Chatterjee has also served in multiple leadership roles in SRA, including as chair of specialty groups on Resilience Analysis, Security and Defense, and Engineering and Infrastructure. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the Risk Analysis journal. 

Chatterjee’s expertise and experience lie at the convergence of the various sciences of risk, infrastructure networks, data, and decisions. His research encompasses critical infrastructure network resilience modeling and simulation; security risk, uncertainty, and decision analytics; and multi-agent learning and multi-level optimization. He serves as a principal investigator, project manager, and key technical staff member on national security and computational science research efforts in support of multiple sponsors. He has authored two books, six book chapters, and more than 115 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, and technical reports and has received multiple best paper awards, research honors, and exceptional contribution awards. Chatterjee is an affiliate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and an adjunct teaching faculty member in civil and environmental engineering at Washington State University–Tri-Cities in Richland, Washington. He is a senior member of IEEE, completed postdoctoral training in operations research at the DHS-CREATE Homeland Security Center of Excellence at the University of Southern California, and obtained a PhD in civil engineering with a focus on transportation systems from Vanderbilt University.