Dr. Omar Nofal joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Florida International University in August 2022 as an assistant professor in structural engineering and risk and reliability analysis of structures. Over the last five years, Dr. Nofal’s research focused on flood and hurricane risk, mitigation analysis, post-hazard functionality, and recovery assessment for buildings and communities. His research seeks to improve the built environment’s performance against natural hazards including physical, social, and economic systems.

Dr. Nofal received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University in 2021 His doctoral research focused on developing hazard, exposure, and vulnerability models for buildings and infrastructure along with risk and resilience analysis at the building- and community-level with the overarching goal of tracking the performance of communities flowing natural hazards such as floods and hurricanes. His work included developing a multi-hazard risk analysis approach for coastal communities to account for the combined impacts of hurricane-induced surge, wave, and wind hazards.

He participated in several community engagement activities, post-hazard reconnaissance investigations, and field studies for tracking the recovery of impacted communities following natural hazards. Dr. Nofal worked on multiple federally funded research projects (e.g., NSF, NIST, NOAA, and DHS) during his Ph.D. and post-doctoral fellowship at Colorado State University. Recently, he started to focus on developing better digitization approaches for communities using digital twin modeling to better discretize the built environment with the overarching goal of developing high-resolution risk and resilience assessment methods for buildings and communities.