 It's my pleasure to introduce Professor Roshi Niteki. I'm going to begin with a brief apology because I'm sure that even within the, if I use the whole five minutes, I would not come close to doing her accomplishments justice. So I'm going to do what I can. So Roshi joined Purdue in 2015 following the completion of her PhD and a subsequent postdoc both in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She had previously received a Master's in Engineering from Imperial College London in Mechanical Engineering. At Purdue, she lead the laboratory for advancing sustainable critical infrastructure. Roshi develops data-centric interdisciplinary approaches to using advanced analytical techniques for modeling risk and resilience of critical infrastructure across spatio-temporal scales, especially as applied to energy infrastructure. In other words, she's working to build tools and methods to understand and improve complex infrastructure systems in the face of significant uncertainty from events such as natural disasters or the ongoing effects of climate change. One of the key things to note in regards to her career is that she's deeply focused on putting her research to work, so to speak. Models developed as part of her research program are being used by energy utility companies and federal agencies, and her research has also been featured in the national news. She's also received multiple best paper awards from organizations such as IEEE and the International Society for Risk Analysis, the later being an organization that she's very heavily involved with. Within the school, an area close to my heart teaching, she's been integral in teaching one of our core sophomore classes, IE 330 in statistical modeling, and has developed multiple graduate level courses on predictive modeling, risk analytics, energy systems management, and climate modeling, especially under extreme weather events. Her graduate level courses frequently have been cross-listed with environmental and ecological engineering and earth atmospheric and planetary sciences, so further evidence of her interdisciplinary, which is pretty awesome. We've also, she's also been an exceptional mentor to her graduate students and postdocs with a special emphasis on effective mentoring for other female engineers and scientists, most of which have gone on to faculty positions, which is exceptional, and was recognized through the Peru IE GSO. She was the inaugural recipient of the IE Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award in 2016. Presently, Roche is not here. We miss her greatly in Brissum, but she is serving as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the US Department of Energy. It's an honor to have colleagues, such as Roche, as a part of the Peru IE family. And so without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to her. And I would also like to say congratulations to the other awardees on behalf of the school. Thank you. Thank you so much, Pat. I really appreciate the very kind introduction. So I am keeping the talk pretty informal, just sharing my story, so that you'll see a lot of pictures, basically starting with a picture of me running, something I love doing, which I let go off a little bit during early years at Purdue when I'm trying to ramp it back up again. But I'm showing this picture because of the logo that you see on my running shirt, which is the map of the country that I was born in, Iran, which as you know, some people in the US pronounce as Iran, so it kind of makes it a appropriate maybe logo for running shirts. I was born in Tehran, the capital of Iran. And I'm just throwing a picture because sometimes people have an image of a desert-like place, but we actually have a very pretty high mountains with great powder, snow for steam for those who might be interested. I left Iran when I was 16 to do my A-levels and then pursue my undergraduate degrees at Imperial College London. So I, yeah, I majored in mechanical engineering and in my final year, I took a course on energy systems, which sort of allowed me to learn about the impact of our energy system on global climate change. And that kind of created an aha moment for me, motivated me that, yeah, this is where I want to spend my professional life. And I, yeah, unlike many of my peers at a time who joined management consulting or car manufacturing companies, I came here to the US to pursue my graduate degree at Hopkins. That's a, it's a very unique department that I joined. They're very interdisciplinary in their focus and they changed names. So at the time when I joined, it was called a geography and environmental engineering, but as Patrick kindly reminded us, it's now environmental health and engineering. Either way, I got to work with really great people and I was focusing on modeling the impact of hurricanes and reliability and resilience of coastal power distribution systems. But towards the end of my PhD, there was a really amazing opportunity available at National Science Foundation through their CIS program, Science, Engineering, Education for Sustainability, which basically allowed early career of like research, recent PhD grants to be the sole PI of the grants. So I wrote a 15 page regular NSF proposal on sustainable energy infrastructure planning, thankfully it was funded, which allowed me to continue being affiliated at Hopkins, was working with lots of interdisciplinary centers, teaching courses like sustainability and sustainability science, predictive modeling, statistical computing, many of which I extended and offered at Purdue as well, but also allowed me to join resources for the future as a research scientist for those who might not be familiar with resources for the future. They do really great work. It's a think tank basically and that focuses on modeling a lot of really interesting things including the energy system. And that was a really wonderful experience. It allowed me to expand my network of interdisciplinary collaborators, but also learn the barriers and benefits of working in large interdisciplinary teams which has kind of shaped the way we do research in my lab. And towards the end of the CIS fellowship, of course I started looking for an academic career and thankfully Purdue was a great fit for what I was pursuing at the time as I joined the industrial engineering department. Now, you might be thinking, wow, she's been hopping from one department to another mechanical, environmental and then industrial, but in fact, the theme of my research interest has actually stayed pretty consistent through time. So I unfortunately haven't included a lot of technical details of my lab's work. I encourage you to take a look at my website if your time allows, but essentially I'm interested in looking at the impact of extreme weather and climate events on infrastructure both in near term and long term under global climate change. And I find this area fascinating and important as you might say, hey, you're biased, of course, but just to motivate it a bit further, I wanna draw your attention to NOS, a national climatic data center which produces a lot of really great statistics. I invite you to visit their website, but this is one of the plots that you can get that shows the number of billion dollar weather and climate disaster. So for an event to show up on this graph and eventually have cost at least a billion dollar or more, I wanna show this because as part of my motivating my talk back when I was interviewing at Purdue in 2014, I was showing this because I had done some work for 2011, that's the orange line that was like the Warsaw record. Then I continued showing it because unfortunately then 2016 was terrible and then 2017 surpassed it. And look at when we are in 2020. So these are definitely some foundational challenges that require cross-disciplinary efforts to ensure that we remain more resilient under extreme climate events and climate change. So I've had the honor of working with really wonderful collaborators at IE but I also want to acknowledge the wonderful resources available at Purdue, notably Purdue Climate Change Research Center and the Center for the Environment that have really impacted my career trajectory, not just in terms of providing seed funding which then allowed me to pursue externally federal funded, sorry, federal funding but also exposing me to some really great collaborators that also shaped my research program and allowing for stakeholder engagements. I had a lot of fun participating in the climate change impact assessment. I found the work to be very meaningful and it opened lots of new questions and research opportunities for us. And as part of the professionals, beyond Purdue, I'm involved in a few different professional societies but as Pat kindly mentioned, Society for Risk Analysis is what I'm most involved with and if you guys don't know about it, I encourage you to take a look. There's some really great work being done there. I recently got elected as a council member which is a counselor which is the governing body of society and I'm chairing the science committee and co-chairing the education committee. And in part of the science committee, we are thinking deeply about the science policy interface and I wanna talk about it a little bit more because that has just sort of motivated where I am now. Should I talk about it a little bit? And the flagship journal of Society for Risk Analysis is the Journal of Risk Analysis. Currently at the area editor for the mathematical modeling track. So putting a shameless plug in there. So if you have work that fits the scope, I'd love to see your contribution. But of course, as we know, external federal funding is really integral to having a well-functioning research, oh, well, good to run your research program effectively essentially. But I wanted to highlight my recent experience with NSF iCorps which was really different to any other NSF experience that I had. And again, you might be thinking, wow, she's switching gears a little bit but I have been doing a lot of soul searching over the past year or two about how to increase our research impact. The nature of my research is pretty applied. And it seems like getting good publications and getting- Two minutes left. Oh, okay, I'm gonna, yeah. So I'm looking at creative ways of seeing how we can transfer some of the technology that we are developing that can have societal impact and having a more sort of impact the policy-making arena as well which sort of motivated where I am now. I'm currently on research leave at the Department of Energy as part of the AAAS program, learning not only about the dynamics and the DOE which is very eye-opening and I'm happy to talk about more but as part of AAAS, I'm learning about the complex legislative process in the federal government which is really interesting. If you asked me the source of all my joy over the past six years, I would say working with exceptional students. I know I'm running short of time but I really wanna give shout out to my exceptional students. So Renee was my first PhD grad, just accepted a tenure track faculty position at Penn State. Ben who's done really amazing work and when he graduated, he's now at Stanford doing a postdoc and getting lots of really great interviews and we just learned that his last chapter of his PhD dissertation got accepted for publication in nature communications. So yay Ben and Deb's who started really strong. Actually her first publication was in nature communications. She's done really amazing work and she did an internship in Capital One. They made her an offer, she couldn't decline so now she's a data scientist there. Just given a shout out because I know I'm running out of time so I can't go in much detail about the wonderful work that Sianty is doing as an assistant prof at University of Buffalo and Megan at University of Virginia, my former postdocs and then of course my current PhD students. I'm learning so much from them and a quick shout out to my master's students who are all playing big as data scientists in tech. Of course there are many more faces of master's students without thesis and undergraduate students but 10 minutes is awfully short but seriously I don't know what I did to be so lucky to work with such amazing students and I'm forever grateful for that. And finally I wanna share my two cents because I had early career and graduate students in mind as I was presenting as I was reflecting back to my past six years. And I know, yeah the first thing I want to highlight is having a support, a strong support network and that's not just social support but mentoring and that's not necessarily just formal mentoring but informal mentoring that you might get from your peers or people even slightly senior to you or much more senior to you. And I think the academic route can get really difficult at times. And yeah, I think I'm very indebted to that great support network that I had and I just wanna give two shout outs to Susan Hunter and Steve Landry who have had an incredible, they've just been incredible during some really tough times during this journey and I'm very grateful for the support I received. And actually speaking of social support, the next speakers, I just had to sorry Sadek I'm digressing but Sadek and his wife are such great friends and honestly we've been so blessed with having so many wonderful colleagues and friends at Purdue who've just made the life so much more memorable. And the last one I know that I've run out of time is kind of maybe an advice to me. I can talk about it during Q and A I don't have to talk about balance. If you do have questions, please put them in the chat. Thank you. Yeah, thank you Roshi. I'm a new assistant professor from industry engineering. Yeah, so great to you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, great to hear your story. And you mentioned your research is more on the applied side. So the same situation on me, my research is also more kind of applied side. So, but I figure out it may be difficult to apply like fundamental research funding from NSF but I do see you received a multiple funding from NSF. So do you have any suggestions or tips for the work like more applied side research to apply like NSF funding? Do you have any tips on that? Absolutely, and why don't we follow up because I don't want to give a, I can't find the short answer to that. Actually, you know, NSF is moving a lot towards convergence research, right? So there's a lot of motivation to place funding on type of research that addresses foundational issues, right? It's not incremental in nature but has deep applications. But I think maybe knowing your, so actually NSF has been the primary source of my funding. And I know of a lot of really great programs that support interdisciplinary research and I would love to follow up with you when pass on anything that I've learned over the years. And welcome again, sorry, yeah. I've been away from campus and I wasn't aware of you joining. Roshi, we have Oz Susan put a question in the chat. I'm wondering if you would be able to share more about your current AAAS position and any insights or things you have learned. Yeah, absolutely. So this has been, the experience has been more interesting that I anticipated. So the way the AAAS is structured is that you get placed within an office basically that kind of of your choosing. I mean, there's an interview process but really it's shaped by your interest. So as part of that, as part of a fellow you get to, you have a lot of flexibility of what you contribute to. So so far I'm sort of learning the ropes but I participate in the interactions of DOE with national labs, right? And then at the same time I learn of the inner workings of how they put through the funding calls. And then learning of the dynamics or politics of even between sub offices within a director at DOE. So it's a lot of things that I would have never and I'm happy to share more details a little bit later. So this is that the DOE side has been really eye-opening and I was pretty intentional about not going to an agency that I knew a bit more about. DOE has always been a black box for me. So this has been interesting but in parallel through AAAS we get 20% time for professional development which essentially what it means is that we get lots of trainings about how the government works, the legislative process, the budgeting process which is way more complex that I knew. I knew I knew very little about the government but it's been enlightening in the fact that yeah, I didn't know how complicated the whole working is. So I'm still learning but so far it's been really great. And yeah, the other interesting part is that I, so AAAS year is very well advertised for early career people but there's actually a good number of academics. So the other person in my cohort is a full professor at UT Austin and we were talking about the steep learning curve because everything in the government seems to be different. But yeah, I've had a really positive experience so far and I'm happy to share more details with anybody who might be interested afterwards. We do have time for a couple more questions. I guess I'll ask you a quick one. How have you been able to maintain balance for the first few years? Yeah, that's the part that I wanted to say to me balance is myth. I have not been able to do that but one thing I wanted to say as I was saying like I have early career people in mind but also myself in mind is that when I talk to a lot of academics including and especially me as we can be very goal oriented and want to get certain things done and think about other equally important things like our health later. The problem is when we neglect our emotional and physical health, it actually has long-term effects that are not positive for our research trajectory. I tried to remind myself I didn't do a good job of it last year but I'm just hoping that's something we all keep in mind. I think I'm getting the hand from the college to move on although we did have a hand raised from Professor Artakani. So if you're interested. So I want to give a shout out to our Zoom I have been a great friend so I'll follow up with you later. Thanks for participating. And yes, thanks for everybody for this wonderful opportunity. And again, a second thanks to Susan. You know how grateful I've been. Great, thank you Rishi for a great presentation and congratulations on your accomplishments. But I was going to ask is that part of the recent discussions and some of the larger funding opportunities that are becoming available one for example area that is of interest for NSF is climate change. If Purdue wants to be a leader in that platform what are the expertise that you think are critical that we are missing at the moment? Oh wow, that's a very profound question. I actually, I mean, I've been part of the some of the brainstorming in PCSARC as people were trying to think through these big calls that are going to come out not necessarily out of NSF but lots of other different agencies related to climate resilience. And I think we do have a lot of in-house expertise. And I love the fact that our interdiscipline centers facilitates these discussion talks. I think maybe creating bandwidth for professors to invest time to meet ahead of time to have a coherent maybe proposal for some of the calls that are coming online might be key and that's something that has been discussed. So I'm not talking about necessarily expertise I'll have to think about that a little bit and maybe follow up but I do know that we have a wide range of expertise at the interface of behavioral science, climate science and engineering. But I do think maybe finding bandwidth for those experts to get together and generate something that is truly interdisciplinary and convergent might be key. But that's a great question and I'm not sure I gave you a coherent answer. But I should think about it and follow up later. Thanks. Well, thank you. Once again, congratulations Roshi. Thank you Pat. Great to see you again. And congratulations again to all of the other associate professors being honored today.