Jamie Ellen Padgett

Jamie Ellen Padgett is the Stanley C. Moore Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. Her research focuses on multi-hazard risk and resilience of infrastructure systems, emphasizing probabilistic methods for assessing structural portfolios exposed to earthquakes, hurricanes, and aging. She leads the Padgett Research Group, investigating resilience of energy infrastructure, transportation systems, and community-scale hazard mitigation.

Education: B.S. Civil Engineering (University of Florida, 2003); Ph.D. Structural Engineering (Georgia Tech, 2007).

Key Roles: Faculty Director of the Gulf Scholars Program, Leadership in NIST’s Community Disaster Resilience Center, and NSF-funded DesignSafe-CI Cyberinfrastructure. She serves on editorial boards of journals such as ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering and chairs ASCE committees.

Research Interests: Fragility models for storage tanks and nuclear casks, climate-driven coastal risks, and machine learning applications in structural reliability. Her work bridges engineering and social systems to enhance community resilience.

Awards: 2017 ASCE Walter L. Huber Prize, 2023 TAMEST Award, NSF CAREER Award (2011), and Fellow of ASCE’s Structural Engineering Institute.

Grants & Collaborations: NSF NHERI, SSPEED Center, and Gulf Research Program-funded initiatives. Her projects include modeling hurricane impacts on petrochemical facilities and nuclear waste storage resilience.

Labs & Teams: Padgett Research Group (focused on energy infrastructure resilience) and SSPEED Center (severe storm prediction and disaster response).