Pranavesh Panakkal, Ph.D., brings more than 10 years of experience in risk and resilience modeling and research. Pranavesh received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Calicut University and his master's degree in Structural Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He then attended Rice University, earning a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering. During his Ph.D., Pranavesh developed multi-modal AI systems for real-time flood situational awareness. His postdoctoral research at Rice University developed probabilistic flood risk assessment methods for infrastructure resilience applications.

At The Water Institute, Pranavesh will leverage his expertise in infrastructure risk and resilience modeling, situational awareness, disaster response, and responsible AI to equip communities with algorithms and tools to predict and sense the performance of infrastructure systems to stressors such as natural hazards to inform response and recovery in short- and long- timescales. His work will focus on advancing the understanding of infrastructure resilience in response to natural disasters and climate change.