CCEE’s Dr. Ashly Cabas wins NSF CAREER Award

Dr. Ashly Cabas

CCEE assistant professor Dr. Ashly Cabas received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. The award is one of the highest honors given by NSF to young faculty members in science and engineering.

“These last two years have been hard, with the pandemic affecting many aspects of our personal and professional lives,” Cabas tweeted. “I am thankful for those who support me, embrace my fascination with earthquakes and soils, and share my dream of changing the world by empowering our amazing students.”

Cabas and a team of CCEE researchers will study the response of soils to earthquake ground shaking at multiple scales and enable its incorporation into system-level probabilistic seismic hazard assessments for water distribution systems. Read her full award abstract here.

“I am very excited for Ashly and her research group,” said CCEE Head Dr. Mort Barlaz. “She is doing important work on seismic hazard assessment that will advance our understanding of the response of soils to ground motion. Ultimately, her work will make it safer for everyone who lives in seismically active locations.”

Cabas, who completed her undergraduate studies at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, Venezuela, earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech. Her research interests include the assessment of seismic hazards, performance-based design in geotechnical engineering, and prediction of the response of soils and foundation systems to seismic loading and dynamic soil-foundation-structure interaction. She primarily focuses on the advancement of the current understanding of the impact that local soil conditions have on ground motions, improving the assessment of site-specific seismic hazards, and elucidating the correlation between ground motion parameters and structural response and damage.

Cabas has received numerous accolades including 2021 NC State Impact Scholar, 2021 New Faces in American Society of Civil Engineering Geo-Institute, 2020 Fellow for the National Science Foundation Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards and Disasters Researchers Fellowship Program, and 2017 ASCE Excellence in Civil Engineering Education (ExCEEd) Fellow.