January 30, 2026

Ph.D. student Emily Payne joined the BiSSL group in Spring 2022 while she was still an undergraduate Architectural Engineering student. On January 30th she successfully defended her Mechanical Engineering PhD. Her Ph.D. thesis work is titled “Learning from Biological Ecosystems to Design and Analyze Resilience in Complex Multi-flow Systems” and has produced 5 journal papers and 5 conference papers. She’ll be starting at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) this summer after her graduation.

She is a member of the Society of Women Engineers and our Mechanical Engineering Female Graduate Student Association (MEFEGs) and actively supports engaging with the next generation of female engineers. She has collected a host of awards while a graduate student in BiSSL, including a Energy Institute Chevron Energy Graduate Fellow in 2025 and a Boeing Fellow in 2024, the Susan M. Arseven ’75 “Make A difference” memorial award from WISE in 2025, the 2023 J. Mike Walker ’66 Impact Award, and the Women in Engineering Chevron Award in 2023. Emily has worked on developing a more sustainable balance between building energy usage and resilient technology with research looking at improving the sustainable ranking of buildings. Her primary thesis work focuses on resilience in cyber-physical power systems, seeking to improve resilience through modeling the cyber-physical interface and our ability to understand risk propagation through the multi-layer complex network.

Her dissertation presents a holistic approach for the analysis of complex multi-flow systems taking inspiration from nature’s resilient ecosystems. Graph-based methodologies containing analogies from ecological modeling, including plant-pollinator networks and predator-prey networks, provide an innovative approach for balancing resilience, sustainability, and robustness. The proposed approaches assist in identifying critical interdependencies between components, analyzing patterns of adversarial system impact, and provide design suggestions for the future construction of cyber-physical power systems and sustainable buildings.

You can read a focus piece on Emily’s unique path to a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering here.