Dr. Grace Yan

Assistant Professor

Dr. Grace Yan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering of Missouri University of Science and Technology. Before this, she held a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at University of Texas at El Paso and a Lecturer position at University of Western Sydney, Australia. She got her PhD degree from Harbin Institute of Technology, China in 2006.

She is passionate about the mitigation of hazards induced by tornadoes and the improvement of the life quality in tornado valley through addressing the common fear. She believes proper tornado resistance is a matter for the entire community. To achieve true tornado resistance, it needs the whole community to be alert and act appropriately. She has been endeavoring to develop a virtual-reality visualization tool based on physically-based modelling to facilitate people’s decision on structural reinforcement in order to achieve a tornado-ready community.

Through this TED talk, she wishes that she could awaken the whole community to play together towards a tornado-resistant community. She also does research on resilient infrastructural systems in multi-hazard environments, structural health monitoring and sensor technologies. She has published 32 journal papers and 49 conference papers. She is the recipient of 13 research grants.