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Contact: derya.deniz@ozyegin.edu.tr

Dr. Derya Deniz is currently an Assistant Professor and a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow in the Department of Civil Engineering at Ozyegin University, Turkey.  She graduated from Middle East Technical University with her B.S in Civil Engineering. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her doctoral dissertation, she worked on seismic collapse risk assessment of building frames. After completion of her Ph.D. study, she first joined the University of Colorado and then Colorado State University to work as a research associate for three years to assess flood damage of several structures affected by the Colorado and North Carolina floods. Since she joined Ozyegin University in 2017, she has coordinated and involved in several national and EU research projects to develop disaster loss and resilience models for building portfolios. She is currently giving consulting service to the Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool (TCIP; DASK in Turkish) in the development of flood insurance premiums for Turkey. She is also currently reviewer for several journals and an active committee member for ASCE-Infrastructure Resilience Division (IRD), ASCE SEI Multi-hazard Mitigation, and NIST Community Resilience Panel. She has main research interests on flood loss and risk analysis, earthquake engineering, disaster mitigation, resilient and sustainable building design, multi-hazard impacts, nonstructural disaster losses and business interruptions, and risk-based decision-making.

Dr. Deniz’s academic background and multi-disipliniary research experiences have given her new perspectives and have inspired research ideas of her own regarding resilient infrastructure and communities against multi-hazard events. Her academic goals are first,  to share and expand her expertise to develop a better understanding of impacts of natural hazards, and second, to develop rigorous design approaches that will mitigate these hazards and contribute to the broad goal of societal risk management. Moreover, she seeks to educate and train young engineers that are more globally engaged in research and practice, and to develop new courses incorporating the most recent research in the field through an interdisciplinary setting.

 

EDUCATION

2014        Ph.D. in Structural Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

Dissertation Title: “Stochastic Prediction of Collapse of Building Structures under Seismic Excitations”.

Advised by Junho Song at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Jerome F. Hajjar at Northeastern University.

2008        M.S. in Transportation Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

Advised by Erol Tutumluer and John S. Popovics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

2006        B.S. in Civil Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

 

ACADEMIC AND WORK APPOINTMENTS

2021  – 2023        Consultant for Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool (DASK) on national flood and landslide insurance

2020  – 2022       Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow, Dept. of Civil Engineering, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey

2017  – Present   Assistant Professor, Dept. of Civil Engineering, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey

2015 – 2017          Post-doctoral Fellow at Center of Risk-based Community Resilience Planning, Colorado State Univ., CO, USA

2014 – 2015         Research Associate, Dept. of Civil, Environ. and Arch. Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

2007 – 2014        Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

2003 – 2010        Several office/ site engineering positions (short-term or internships) at The Thornton-Tomasetti Group (Oakland, CA and Newark, NJ offices), and the Tepe Group in Istanbul, Turkey.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Structural collapse models, earthquake engineering, flood loss and risk analysis, multi-hazard performance, nonstructural hazard losses, post-disaster recovery modeling, business interruptions, disaster resilience of industrial facilities, resilient and sustainable building design, uncertainty quantification, risk-based decision making, disaster mitigation.