Moustafa Naiem Awarded Vanier CGS Scholarship

The Department of Civil Engineering is proud to announce that Moustafa Naiem, PhD student has been awarded a Vanier CGS Scholarship. Named after Major-General Georges P. Vanier, the first francophone Governor General of Canada, the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (Vanier CGS) is awarded to top ranking doctoral students who demonstrate academic excellence, research potential, and leadership.

Student Bio: 
Moustafa Naiem is a graduate from the Structural Engineering department in Cairo University in Egypt, earning his B.Sc. degree in 2016 and graduating first-of-class. He worked as a Teaching Assistant while earning his Masters degree in Structural Topology Optimization and Steel Structures Design at the same university in 2018.  Moustafa's passion went beyond academia - he was involved in reshaping the extra-curricular community at Cairo University during his undergraduate years. He was the co-founder and license holder for TEDxCairoUniversity for over three years, held a TEDx conference, and later became a mentor for the TEDx Community - and other organizations - in Egypt. At McMaster University, Moustafa has been developing measures to quantify critical infrastructure network resilience in cities under climate change-induced systemic (cascade) risks. His work has the potential to save billions of dollars.

Title of Research Proposal: 
"A Resilient Canada in the Face of Climate Change-Induced Systemic Risks"

Lay Abstract of the proposed research: 
In the past decades, Canada has witnessed a continuous increase in the frequency and magnitude of climate change-induced natural disasters. These events include droughts, floods, wildfires, and most recently, tornadoes. In 2016, climate change induced damage was estimated to be $8.6 billion in Canada, while in the United States of America, floods are becoming one of the costliest and highest in occurrence of all climate change induced hazards, costing an average of $8 billion dollars annually. Also, hurricanes such as hurricane Sandy cost over $67 billion dollars of total damage, while more recently. hurricane Florence resulted in an estimated damage of $5 billion so far. It is thus clear that the effect of climate change is already costing Canadians billions of dollars annually, at an increasing rate. Given the effect of these events on cities, there is yet to be a clear methodology to quantify a city’s resilience in the face of such hazards, and predict the losses, that also takes into account the interdependence of different infrastructure networks. Although there have been multiple frameworks in literature, none has been comprehensive for a large-scale city. As such, the proposed methodology introduces the utilization of several Machine Learning techniques to propose a 4-steps framework that quantifies city resilience under floods.