Heuristic Approach to Engineering Decisions towards Resilient Infrastructure and Communities

Sissy Nikolaou is a practicing earthquake engineer with more than 20 years of experience. Her education includes a Diploma from the NTUA, Greece and MSc and PhD degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB), where she is now an Advisory Board member of the Dean of Engineering. She is a Multi-Hazards and Geotechnical Engineering Principal at WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff in New York City, where she oversees the organization’s multi-hazard resilience engineering practice. She sees earthquake engineering as an art form that can be used to create future cities and sustain existing communities. Her goal is to find solutions to the challenge of transforming humanity’s desire for resiliency and sustainability into quantifiable terms and incorporate these solutions in engineering design frameworks.