Postdoctoral Scholars

Nilufer Oran Gibson is a Ph.D. candidate in Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington. She obtained her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Gazi University in Ankara, Turkey and M.S. in Engineering Management at The University of Texas at Arlington. Her current research focuses on agent-based modeling of the development and analysis of crowd-sourced solutions to address the needs of vulnerable populations, including volunteer-driven transportation networks for the older adults and urban food recovery networks for the homeless. She emprically develops agent characteristics and decision metrics based on the concept of personas and PAPRIKA methodology. She is a member of the human systems modeling team within the Iowa UrbanFEWS project, responsible to develop the personas of Iowa producers for the agent-based modeling of policy decisions to increase local food production and consumption. Her email address is nilufer.oran@mavs.uta.edu.

Tássia Mattos Brighenti has M.S. (2013 – 2015) and a Ph.D. (2015-2019) degrees in Environmental Engineering from Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Associate under supervision by Dr. Philip Gassman, in the Iowa UrbanFEWS project. Her work involves the use of the SWAT model to evaluate the environmental and agronomic performance of a suite of cropping systems, including row crops, and perennial grasses and/or horticultural crops, across multiple watershed scales in the Des Moines area.