Stephanie Paal

Dr. Stephanie Paal is the Williams Brothers Construction Company Associate Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University. Dr. Paal has extensive background knowledge and expertise in machine learning and machine vision and applications of these technologies in infrastructure and structural condition assessments and other infrastructure-related practices. Her research focus is on mitigating the effects of natural disasters on built infrastructure by integrating traditional civil engineering practices with emerging techniques and technologies. Her current research interests are toward hybrid artificial intelligence-physics-based approaches, understanding the impact of integrating artificial intelligence models and methodologies in civil engineering design, analysis and evalua­tion operations, and developing advanced modeling approach­es grounded in real-world data. Her research has been supported by numerous state and federal agencies such as the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Texas Department of Transportation, the National Association of Home Builders, and the National Science Foundation. In 2020, she was granted an NSF Early CAREER award for her research toward enhancing the understanding of our infrastructure's performance under natural hazards by leveraging available experimental data and artificial intelligence. Dr. Paal joined the faculty at Texas A&M in the Fall of 2016 after completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. She received her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Civil Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2011 and 2013, respectively. Additionally, she received a B.S. in Architectural Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009.