Invited Speakers
Dr. Altintas is the Chief Data Science Officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and
the Founding Director of the Societal Computing and Innovation Lab. Since joining SDSC in 2001,
she has been a principal investigator and a technical leader in a wide range of cross-disciplinary
projects. She holds a PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam.
Dr. Yaghoobian is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Florida State University and
an Associate of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Institute. As NSF CAREER awardee, her research focuses on
fire dynamics, land-atmosphere interactions, environmental fluid dynamics, turbulence, and computational modeling.
Dr. Zhao is an associate professor in Transportation Engineering at the University of Florida.
She received Early-Career Research Fellowship of NASEM's Gulf Research Program. Her research has been
supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
and the U.S. Geological Survey, etc.
Dr. Morgan Varner is Director of Research and Senior Scientist at Tall Timbers, a Tallahassee-based research station founded in 1958. He leads seven research labs focused on understanding the role of fire in maintaining plant and animal biodiversity. He has published over 150 papers and book chapters on wildland fire ecology and prescribed fire policy. He received his BS from the University of Idaho, MS from Auburn University, and PhD from the University of Florida, and previously held faculty positions at Humboldt State University, Mississippi State University, and Virginia Tech.
Dr. Neetesh Sharma is an Assistant Professor in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the RIDER Center, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. His research centers on enhancing the resilience and reliability of infrastructure systems
in the face of natural hazards by employing advanced mathematical modeling, uncertainty quantification, and machine learning techniques.
He holds an MS and a PhD degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Divina Lade is the Director of Geospatial Environmental and Resilience Planning at the
Apalachee Regional Planning Council in Florida, where she manages regional GIS systems
and supports resilience planning across nine counties through spatial analysis, remote
sensing, and vulnerability assessment. She holds a Master's degree in Geographic
Information Science and is currently a PhD student in Urban and Regional Planning at
Florida State University.
