Prateek Arora

About Prateek

Prateek is a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Previously, Prateek was a Ph.D. candidate at New York University (NYU) in Civil and Urban Engineering. He is supervised by Dr. Luis Ceferino, who leads the Disaster Risk Analysis Lab at UC Berkeley. Prateek’s research focuses on utility risk management in natural disasters. His current focus is on improving the resilience of power systems to hurricanes by (a) forecasting power outage recovery during disasters for emergency response, (b) investing in increased resilience through the deployment of distributed energy resources such as solar panels, and (c) digital twins for infrastructure networks for optimal decision making during disasters. Before starting his Ph.D. studies, Prateek worked as a structural engineer in San Francisco. He obtained his MS in Structural Engineering (2020) from Stanford University, CA, and his B.E. (Hons.) in Civil Engineering from BITS Pilani, India (2018).

Research Interests

• Risk Analysis: Utility risk management, Natural hazards
• Machine Learning: Power outage prediction, surrogate modeling of disasters
• Digital Twins: Structural infrastructure monitoring

  News

• [August. 2025] Prateek joined as a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley.
• [July. 2025] Prateek successfully defended his dissertation on “Probabilistic Modeling for Power Outages and Adoption of Renewables for Enhancing Power Infrastructure Resilience to Extreme Events”.
• [May. 2025] Prateek presented his research at the ASCE-EMI 2025 conference on the use of AI and satellite imagery to detect power outages and received the best paper award by the objective resilience committee.
• [November. 2024] Prateek participated in the Extremes Workshop 2024 at Colorado School of Mines, where he gave a lightning talk and presented a poster on the resilience of power systems during extremes.
• [April. 2024] Prateek was invited to attend the International Conference on Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (2024) and Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure Fellowship Convocation upon completing his CDRI fellowship project for 2022-2023.
• [Jan. 2024] Prateek completed his research proposal defense on “ Probabilistic Methods for Power Outage Predictions and Adoption of Renewables towards the Resilience of Power Infrastructure to Extreme Weather Events.”
• [Jan. 2024] Journal paper accepted in ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering “A Quasi-Binomial Regression Model for Hurricane-Induced Power Outages during Early Warning.”
• [July. 2023] Presented our research at the International Conference on Applied Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering (ICASP-14, Dublin, Ireland).
• [May. 2023] Journal article published in Natural Hazards Earth System Sciences.
• [Mar. 2023] Two papers were selected to be presented at the International Conference on Applied Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering (ICASP-14, Dublin, Ireland).
• [June. 2022] Prateek passed his Ph.D. Qualifying Exam.
• [April. 2022] Selected as Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure Fellow (2022-23).
• [May. 2021] Selected for NYU Urban Doctoral Fellowship.
• [Jan. 2021] Joined NYU Disaster Risk Analysis Lab as a Ph.D. Student.

Publications

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