As the first graduate of Lehigh University’s Master of Science in Catastrophe Modelling and Resilience program, Urinrin Otite, a Nigerian from Delta State, has created history.
Launched only a year ago, the ground-breaking initiative is a component of Lehigh’s Centre for Catastrophe Modelling and Resilience, which advances research in crisis management and catastrophe risk assessment. Urinrin, a fourth-year PhD candidate at Lehigh in the field of civil engineering, described her accomplishment as one she will “cherish throughout her career” after earning the master’s degree with an exceptional 3.83 CGPA on a 4.0 scale.
Her intellectual prowess began during her undergraduate studies at the University of Port Harcourt, where she earned a first-class degree in civil engineering and was recognised as the Faculty of Engineering’s Best Graduating Student for the class of 2012. Dennis Eme, her previous instructor, remembered her as a superb student who had extraordinary problem-solving abilities.
Urin received several offers from prestigious American universities, such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins, before deciding to pursue her doctorate at Lehigh. In 2017, Urin co-authored a study on fiber-reinforced polymers that was published in the International Journal of Advanced Research and Publications. She was also chosen for the EducationUSA Opportunity Funds Program in 2018.
Urinrin is currently working on expanding the topic of catastrophe risk modelling, which is not well-studied in Nigeria, by creating a probabilistic framework to evaluate the resilience of electricity infrastructure against natural disasters. She made history as the first graduate of this groundbreaking school by embracing new fields like Data Science and Probabilistic Modelling despite the difficulties of switching from structural design to computational analysis.
CREDIT: ALLSCHOOL, Allschoolabs
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