Azin Al Kajbaf Nominated for Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award

Azin Al Kajbaf was chosen as one of the departmental nominees for the Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award. Azin is a full-time Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She is a member of Dr. Michelle Bensi’s research team, which works on research related to risk, reliability, and resilience to natural hazards.

As a GRA, Azin has worked on multiple projects. One of her projects is focused on the application of machine learning methods in estimation of a coastal storm surge. With regards to recent efforts in exploring the operational application of surrogate modeling methods for predicting storm surge, this work provides a comprehensive framework for comparison and assessment of the performance of these methods.

Azin has also worked on a project investigating the effects of locally intense rainfall events on precipitation frequency analysis estimates and addressing sources of uncertainty. This study is motivated by the two recent heavy rainfall events and flash floods in Ellicott City in 2016 and 2018.

In addition to being one of the departmental nominees for the Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award, Azin won a travel award for attending and presenting her research on precipitation frequency analysis at the SRA 2019 (Risk Analysis in the Data Analytics Era) conference.

Approximately 4,000 UMD graduate students serve as teaching, research, or administrative assistants. The Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award conveys the honor of being named among the top 2% of campus GAs in a given year. Only 15 GAs from the Clark School of Engineering are selected for the Award. The qualities of an Outstanding Research Assistant as outlined by The Graduate School are:

Has made important contributions to the faculty member’s research
Has mentored other graduate assistants and students
Evidence of future promise as a researcher
Evidence of scholarly achievements (e.g., publications, conference presentations)

Congratulations to Azin on your Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award!

Published January 14, 2020