2025 PEER Annual Meeting Speaker Bio: Mirna Kassem is a Civil and Environmental Engineer and a Ph.D. candidate in GeoSystems Engineering at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on developing a mechanistic predictive model for rainfall-induced and coseismic landslides at a regional scale. Understanding landslide susceptibility at this scale is vital for risk mitigation and policy decisions. This involves leveraging big data, High-Performance Computing (HPC), and parallel computations to enhance predictive accuracy. The overarching goal of her research is to build more resilient communities by mitigating the socio-economic impacts of landslides. This includes developing a Landslide Early Warning System (LAWS) and assessing how climate change and land use evolution influence landslide triggering at a system level. Her academic interests span across regional slope stability, big data analysis, parallel computing, remote sensing, soil and rock mechanics, seismic hazards analysis, hydrology, geomorphology, machine learning, uncertainty quantification, and spatial analysis. Updated January 2025.
