PNNL

For a second year in a row, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) doctoral intern Jack Watson was awarded the Student Merit Award by the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) and the Resilience Analysis Specialty group. The award recognized excellence in the area of resilience analysis and management.

“It is an honor to be recognized by the SRA organization and to join them in advancing the science of risk analysis and resilience,” Watson said. He is interning with PNNL’s Data Sciences and Machine Intelligence group under the mentorship and guidance of Samrat Chatterjee, senior data scientist at PNNL and joint appointee at Northeastern University, and Auroop Ganguly, professor at Northeastern University and joint appointee at PNNL, and pursuing a doctoral degree in interdisciplinary engineering at Northeastern University. Northeastern University is an academic partner to PNNL with several joint appointments and research projects in progress between faculty, students, and PNNL scientists.

Watson was recognized for and presented on his recent work at the 2022 SRA Annual Meeting in Tampa, FL. The submission, “Resilience of multi-scale rail networks against compound floods and opportunistic failures” was a collaborative effort between Watson, Chatterjee, and Ganguly. In the face of pressing environmental and cyber-physical challenges posed to the nation’s critical infrastructure, the researchers explore the use of a multi-scale, dynamics-aware, network-of-networks framework to simulate rail systems under compound natural and targeted failures. Funded by the Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center, this work extends the state-of-the-art in quantification of infrastructure resilience with compound natural and hazard scenarios and focuses on urban rail transit networks as a proof-of-concept infrastructure system.  

“We’re facing unprecedented challenges in the resilience of our infrastructure systems to natural and man-made threats. There are simply no historical data points on how compound threats may impact critical connected systems. This makes it important to study the dynamic evolution of these complex systems, how they fail, and how we might restructure them for both resilience and efficiency going forward,” Watson said.

On a similar area of research, Watson, Chatterjee, and Ganguly were also recognized with the award for Best Climate Paper at the 2022 Virtual IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security.

“These recent research awards highlight the broad technical impact of our work and the value of national laboratory and university partnerships, including inbound and outbound joint appointments as well as training of talented students to become the next generation of scientists,” said Chatterjee.

To learn more about PNNL’s academic partnerships and opportunities, visit https://www.pnnl.gov/academia.