2025

• [04/2025] Joe has successfully defended his Dissertation Proposal and is now a PhD candidate. Congratulations!
• [03/2025] Dr. Zhao gave an invited seminar at The Ohio State University, “Leveraging Machine Learning for Risk Analysis and Decision Optimization.”
• [01/2025] Joe has been selected to the Future Faculty Program in the Clark School of Engineering. Congratulations!
• [01/2025] We welcome two new PhD students, Anwoy Talukder Ranjak and Fernando Valenzuela, to our group.

2024

• [10/2024] Mohamed passed his qualifying exam. Congratulations!
• [08/2024] Akinjide Makinde and Matthew Collins joined our group as master’s students. Welcome!
• [08/2024] Our group has received a grant titled “Improving the computational efficiency and usability of dynamic PRA with reinforcement learning” from the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. We are grateful to NEUP for funding our research. More details can be found here.
• [08/2024] Simon Osgood, an undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering, joined our group. Welcome!
• [06/2024] Joe and Dr. Zhao presented two papers at the Advanced Reactor Safety Conference embedded in the ANS Annual Conference in Las Vegas from June 16-19.
  • Improving the Efficiency of Dynamic Probabilistic Risk Assessment with Monte Carlo Tree Search and Importance Sampling
  • Reducing the Maintenance Cost of Advanced Nuclear Reactors under Risk Constraints through Condition Monitoring, Probabilistic Risk Assessment, and Maintenance Optimization
• [05/2024] Joe received the Jacob K. Goldhaber Travel Award. The award will partially support his travel to the 2024 American Nuclear Society Advanced Reactor Safety Conference. We are grateful to the support of the Graduate School at the University of Maryland.
• [04/2024] Dr. Zhao has been elected to the Executive Committee of the American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear Installations Safety Division.
• [03/2024] Joe passed his qualifying exam. Congratulations!
• [01/2024] Dr. Zhao presented two papers at the 70th Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS® 2024):
  • Solving Large Fault Trees with Importance Sampling and Tree Search
  • Game-Theoretic and Probabilistic Cyber Risk Assessment

2023

• [10/2023] A paper co-authored by Dr. Zhao, “Dynamic Probabilistic Risk Assessment for Electric Grid Cybersecurity,” has been published in Reliability Engineering and System Safety.
• [10/2023] Joe has a conference paper “A Survey of Parameterization Techniques for Bayesian Network Models for Human Reliability Analysis” accepted by PSAM 2023. Congratulations!
• [08/2023] Our paper “An empirical study of the added value of the sequential learning of model parameters to industrial system health monitoring” has been published in Reliability Engineering and System Safety.
• [08/2023] Two new members joined the group. Welcome, Joe and Mohamed!
• [01/2023] The Risk and Decision Analysis Laboratory was established.
• [01/2023] Dr. Zhao joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park as an Assistant Professor. He is also affiliated with the Center for Risk and Reliability.