Groth Honored With USM’s Regents Award

Katrina Groth, an associate professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and associate director of the Center for Risk and Reliability, is the recipient of a University System of Maryland (USM) Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship or Research. She was selected for her work related to hydrogen safety, risk, and reliability.

The award is the highest honor that USM bestows to recognize exemplary faculty achievement. It was presented to Groth formally during a special ceremony held at Towson University earlier this month.

Noting the high caliber of the faculty across USM institutions, Groth said it was a great honor to be selected.

“With 12 universities in USM, there is remarkable, groundbreaking research, teaching, and public service happening in every corner of Maryland. To be named among so many talented professors is inspiring and humbling,” she said.

“I’m excited to continue advancing reliability engineering and hydrogen safety to generate the knowledge needed for the next generation of energy and transportation technologies.” Groth said.

Groth joined the UMD faculty in 2017, after a seven-year stint at Sandia National Laboratories. Since coming to UMD, she has created influential quantitative risk assessment and reliability engineering methods, yielding data and insights regarding hydrogen systems. Her work is used by the International Energy Agency, the Electric Power Research Institute and by U.S. and international governments to define hydrogen safety regulations and standards. Groth has also worked on successful technology collaborations, translating UMD research into hydrogen component reliability data, including a national database used for the DOE and NREL

During her career at UMD, she has received numerous awards and honors, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award that is supporting a bold research initiative aimed at combining Probabilistic Risk Assessment and Prognostics and Health Management. In 2022, she received the Landis Young Member Engineering Achievement Award, a highly competitive national-level award from the American Nuclear Society, for her contributions to probabilistic risk assessment

In 2024, as part of a $62 million U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant program, a multi-institutional team including UMD was awarded $10 million for a project that could help overcome key hurdles to widespread adoption of hydrogen-powered vehicles and equipment. Groth is the Principal Investigator for the UMD activities, and will lead the development of hydrogen safety plans to support the deployment of novel hydrogen fueling station designs.

Published April 22, 2025