Dr. Maha Kenawy is an Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Oklahoma State University. She specializes in seismic hazard and risk assessment, performance-based earthquake engineering, and nonlinear analysis of structures subjected to extreme events. She develops analytical frameworks for assessing the vulnerability of different types of civil structures subjected to natural and man-made hazards. Prior to joining OSU, Dr. Kenawy worked as a consultant in the Buildings and Structures practice at Exponent, Inc. She also previously worked as postdoctoral scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno where she led research efforts on assessing the regional-scale impacts of earthquakes on reinforced concrete building structures using physics-based earthquake fault rupture simulations and high-performance computing. Dr. Kenawy holds a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis, and a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Construction Engineering from the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She is the recipient of several awards including the ASCE O.H. Ammann Research Award in Structural Engineering, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Younger Member Award, and the NSF NHERI Summer Institute Grant for early-career researchers in natural hazard risk reduction.

Research Interests:

My research focuses on identifying and quantifying the nonstationary vulnerabilities of the built environment to natural hazards characterized by large uncertainties, using novel simulation methods and high-performance computing technologies. My work primarily centers on predicting the performance of civil infrastructure systems, including buildings, bridges, and lifelines, and extends to studying the direct interactions of those systems with the uncertainties of seismic hazard, the non-stationarity of climate-driven hazards, and the consequent social vulnerabilities.