Senior Resilience Manager Selected for U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium

Resilience and climate adaptation expert Breanna Gribble, CHMM, ENV SP, WEGD, WELL AP, STV senior resilience manager, is among 100 of the nation’s brightest young professionals selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering (USFOE) symposium.

At the annual symposium, early-career professionals performing exceptional research and work in academia, the government, and in the private sector will come together for the three-day event in Seattle, WA, this September.

“I’m incredibly honored to have been selected to participate,” Gribble said. “I’m looking forward to being seeing what techniques these practitioners are using to collaborate and innovate will help me think about how we can continue to lead in resilience at STV.”

Gribble’s 10 years of expertise in environmental engineering, sustainability and resilience throughout the New York metropolitan region has recently culminated in  a multi-city study organized by the Centre for Livable Cities and the Urban Land Institute, as well as contributions to  a position paper published by the International Coalition of Sustainable Infrastructure.

In recent years, she and her peers at STV have  evaluated the applicability of the four-phase disaster management cycle in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to inform resilience planning for disasters in the future.

“At STV, we talk about designing ‘beyond the code’ and I think a similar mindset can be applied following this pandemic,” she said. “We need to take lessons learned from the complexity and uncertainty associated with COVID-19 and apply the same resilience thinking to the impacts of climate change”.

The 2022 USFOE will be hosted by Amazon in Seattle, WA, and will cover developments in four areas: microbes; conversational AI; technology and racial justice and equity; and hydrogen as a universal energy carrier. Eminent speakers will focus their talks on cutting-edge research and technical case studies for an interdisciplinary audience.

At the symposium, Gribble hopes to collaborate with her peers from across the country, and apply the unique topics of the conference to the work she does at STV. In her mind, “resilience is an interdisciplinary engineering field – it’s all about integration and cross-collaboration” making this conference a perfect incubator for new ideas.

“Resilience is a lens. It’s a way to see the world and how everything is interconnected in a polycentric and collaborative framework,” Gribble said. “The diversity of thought that flourishes at an event like this plays a major role in the work that I do.”