Alumna Earns NSF Early Career Grant

Alumna Alice Alipour hopes to design more resilient electric power networks.

June 18, 2018 - The National Science Foundation has awarded UC Irvine alumna Alice Alipour ’10 a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. Alipour, who earned her doctorate in civil engineering under the advisement of Distinguished Professor emeritus Masanobu Shinozuka, is an assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at Iowa State University. The goal of her project is to create more resilient electric power networks (or EPNs) that can hold up under extreme weather conditions and the effects of aging. With $500,000 over five years, Alipour will take both a component and system-level approach toward assessment and design of electric power transmission line systems.

“Electric power is essential for everyday life and the economy,” Alipour explained. “In recent years, with extreme weather events that have happened, we have seen many outages. Some of these losses are attributed to the vulnerabilities in the physical infrastructure of the power system.”

The NSF CAREER Program supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

– Lori Brandt