UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Mirna Kassem, postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and incoming assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, will give the talk “Regional-scale coupled hydrological and hillslope stability modeling of rainfall-induced landslides” at 2 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 16, in 117 Earth and Engineering Sciences Building at Penn State University Park. The talk will also be available via Zoom.
The event is part of a fall seminar series hosted by TRAnscendIng Natural hazards forecasting (TRAIN). The talk is free and open to the public.
Thousands of landslides occur each year, posing risks to human life, infrastructure and ecosystems. However, current models often focus at the scale of a single hill slope and simplify the system.
“A critical gap persists in assessing landslide hazards at the community scale,” Kassem said. “Existing regional-scale models often struggle to balance physical rigor, predictive accuracy, and computational efficiency. They rely either on empirical approaches with limited physical basis or on mechanistic formulations that rely on major simplifying assumptions.”
Kassem will present CRISIS (Coupled Regional Rainfall-Induced and Seismic Slope Instability Simulations), a physics-based regional landslide prediction framework that will allow for both analysis of past landslides and prediction of future ones.
“Back-analysis of both failed and stable slopes from prior events generates high-resolution spatial estimates of shear strength, which are iteratively refined and used for forward prediction of landslide location, size, depth and timing under future triggering events,” Kassem said. “Results reveal a strong geospatial connection between hillslope location and dominant failure mechanisms, emphasizing that landslide initiation is inherently geospatial and governed by coupled surface-subsurface processes.”
Kassem received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in May. She holds a bachelor of engineering in civil and environmental engineering from the American University of Beirut and an master of science in geosystems engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
Her research focuses on community-scale assessment of rainfall-induced and coseismic landslide hazards to better understand cascading geohazard systems. Her work advances predictive modeling frameworks that support risk-informed decision-making and resilient infrastructure systems.
About TRAIN
TRAIN is an initiative through the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) that aims to transform complex geophysical and atmospheric data and bridge the gap between raw information and community resilience. TRAIN aims to build the community at Penn State to become nationally recognized for research innovation to respond proactively to funding opportunities and coordinate natural hazard responses.