Barbara E. Minsker

Barbara E. Minsker is the Bobby B. Lyle Endowed Professor of Leadership & Global Entrepreneurship at Southern Methodist University, Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Professor of Computer Science (by courtesy). She is concurrently a Senior Fellow at the Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity.

Education

• Ph.D., Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, 1995
• B.S. with Distinction, Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, Cornell University, 1986

Research Focus

Dr. Minsker’s research integrates systems analysis, machine learning, and data analytics to advance urban water sustainability and resilience. Specific themes include real-time flood prediction using crowdsourced traffic data, equitable distribution of green infrastructure, identification of “infrastructure deserts,” and nature-based solutions for storm-water management.

Her methodological toolkit spans optimization under uncertainty, meta-modelling, spatio-temporal analytics, and socio-environmental modelling to address both engineering performance and social equity dimensions of urban infrastructure.

Awards & Honors

• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers (PECASE)
• NSF CAREER Award
• ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize
• Fellow, ASCE Environmental and Water Resources Institute
• ASCE Margaret S. Petersen Award
• Over a dozen additional national and institutional honors spanning 1991-2019

Grants & Advising

As Principal Investigator or co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Minsker has secured more than $25 million in competitive funding from NSF, DOE, US Army Research Office, NIST, ONR, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, Microsoft, ADM, and John Deere. These projects support interdisciplinary teams of graduate students and post-docs working at the intersection of water resources, data science, and societal resilience.

Labs & Teams

She leads an active research group within the Lyle School of Engineering at SMU, collaborating closely with the Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity and leveraging high-performance computing resources for large-scale urban analytics.