Gonzalo Pita is an associate research scientist and director of the MSE in Systems Engineering program in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering. His research centers on natural disaster risk modeling, including hazard modeling (hurricane, seismic, and floods), impacts of climate change, infrastructure vulnerability, simulation of natural hazards effects on socioeconomic systems, and analysis and design of public policies in risk mitigation. He investigates the effects of both induced seismicity (fracking) and riverine floods on vulnerable populations. He is also interested in the structure and uncertainty of catastrophe models—specifically, the development of those models and their use in U.S. natural disaster mitigation policy from 1950 to the 2000s.
Since 2013, Pita has served as a senior consultant at the World Bank, where he leads projects in natural hazards risk assessment and mitigation, design and implementation of asset management systems, and design of natural disaster mitigation public policy.
He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in natural disaster risk modeling, international project management, and introduction to engineering. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Structural Engineering from Universidad Tecnologica Nacional (Cordoba, Argentina), an MSc (Seismic Engineering) from Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, and a PhD from Florida Institute of Technology, and completed postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins University.