Mohammadi to join select early career engineers at Rising Stars workshop

Post-doctoral researcher Neda Mohammadi is one of the few early career women invited to MIT's Rising Stars workshop in October. (Photo: Jess Hunt-Ralston)
Mohammadi

Post-doctoral researcher Neda Mohammadi will join an exclusive group of civil and environmental engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Rising Stars workshop in October.

MIT invites just a handful of early career women to the gathering each year to encourage networking and help them build their careers. The two-day event includes scientific conversation and research presentations, perhaps catalyzing long-term relationships.

“It will be interesting to exchange ideas and engage in discussions with the faculty and researchers from other CEE institutions,” said Mohammadi, who works in Olmsted Professor John Taylor’s Network Dynamics Lab. “I hope this experience can help me advance my academic career as well as lead to future research collaborations.”

Designed for recent Ph.D. graduates and current doctoral students who plan to pursue jobs in academia, the Rising Stars workshop will feature discussions about the early years of a faculty member’s career and how faculty searches work in higher education.

“I am excited to be part of the 2017 MIT Rising Stars program, partly because it will give me a chance to meet some of the outstanding women researchers in CEE and hear about their work,” Mohammadi said.

She’ll also get to present her own research about the relationships among city infrastructure and the ebbs and flows of human activity, Mohammadi said: “For example, how buildings’ energy consumption in one location changes as a result of increases or decreases in human mobility in the same or neighboring locations, and how such relationships unfold over time.”

The idea is to use this knowledge to help people make positive changes in how they interact with their city, she said.