Bio
Dr. El-Dakhakhni is an endowed chair holder at the Faculty of Engineering, McMaster University and serves as the founding director of the INTERFACE Institute as well as the director of the NSERC-CREATE program on Canadian Nuclear Energy Infrastructure under Seismic Systemic Risk (CaNRisk). He has been actively engaged in multiple knowledge mobilization initiatives through serving on several national and international code and standards committees. He is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE), where he is a member of the ASCE Risk & Resilience Measurements Committee and the ASCE Disaster Response and Recovery Committee.
In addition to several industry- and government-sponsored research grants and prestigious awards, Dr. El-Dakhakhni is the recipient of an Ontario Early Researcher Award and is one of the few Canadian researchers to be awarded the prestigious NSERC-Discovery Accelerator Supplement twice in their career. The NSERC-Discovery Accelerator Supplement is intended for “…researchers whose research explores high-risk, novel and transformative concepts and lines of inquiry, and are likely to have impact by contributing to groundbreaking advances in the area…thus providing additional resources to compete with the best in the world”.
Within the INTERFACE Institute, Dr. El-Dakhakhni has been establishing capacity to integrate different immerging concepts into resilience quantification and risk-informed decision-support tools, especially through work at the interfaces between social-, natural- and medical-sciences and engineering. He is focused on creating multi-disciplinary research teams from across the tri-council funding agencies to work on three interrelated areas. The first area deals with identifying and understanding the interactions between different natural and anthropogenic hazards as well as evaluating (qualitatively and quantitatively) their impacts on societies. The second area looks into the interdependence between the different built and natural environment systems and the multi-dimensional impact of catastrophes. The third area aims at integrating the research within the first two areas by mobilizing the gained knowledge into resilience quantification and intelligent systemic-risk decision support platforms.
In addition to several industry- and government-sponsored research grants and prestigious awards, Dr. El-Dakhakhni is the recipient of an Ontario Early Researcher Award and is one of the few Canadian researchers to be awarded the prestigious NSERC-Discovery Accelerator Supplement twice in their career. The NSERC-Discovery Accelerator Supplement is intended for “…researchers whose research explores high-risk, novel and transformative concepts and lines of inquiry, and are likely to have impact by contributing to groundbreaking advances in the area…thus providing additional resources to compete with the best in the world”.
Within the INTERFACE Institute, Dr. El-Dakhakhni has been establishing capacity to integrate different immerging concepts into resilience quantification and risk-informed decision-support tools, especially through work at the interfaces between social-, natural- and medical-sciences and engineering. He is focused on creating multi-disciplinary research teams from across the tri-council funding agencies to work on three interrelated areas. The first area deals with identifying and understanding the interactions between different natural and anthropogenic hazards as well as evaluating (qualitatively and quantitatively) their impacts on societies. The second area looks into the interdependence between the different built and natural environment systems and the multi-dimensional impact of catastrophes. The third area aims at integrating the research within the first two areas by mobilizing the gained knowledge into resilience quantification and intelligent systemic-risk decision support platforms.