EERI is pleased to announce that the 2025 Shah Family Innovation Prize has been awarded to Nicole Paul (M.EERI 2014) in recognition of her groundbreaking research contributions bridging engineering, social science, and data analytics. According to the award citation, "Her commitment to open science—sharing data, code, and interactive tools—democratizes knowledge, accelerating collaborative resilience efforts worldwide...[and her] interdisciplinary vision and dedication to equitable, impactful solutions position her as a transformative force in reducing global earthquake losses."
With a generous gift from the Shah family, EERI annually awards the Shah Family Innovation Prize. This prize rewards younger professionals and academics for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit in the field of earthquake risk mitigation and management. The intent of the prize is to stimulate further creativity and leadership in the earthquake risk mitigation community and EERI.
Nicole Paul recently completed her doctoral studies at University College London on household displacement and return in disasters. Her research brings together engineering, social science, and data analytics to identify which households are likely to experience protracted displacement. She works at the nexus of academic research, policy, and practice, contributing quantitative evidence and models now used by partners such as the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security. In 2026, she will continue her research at ETH Zurich as a postdoctoral fellow, exploring how risk models can inform shelter and housing assistance decisions in the response and early recovery phases post-disaster.
Before beginning her PhD, she spent nearly a decade in industry quantifying disaster risks at multiple scales—from the design and assessment of individual buildings to regional risk studies. Her industry experience includes more than five years with Arup’s Risk and Resilience team in San Francisco and over four years with the Global Earthquake Model Foundation in Pavia, Italy. She is a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of California, with MSc and BSc degrees in civil/structural engineering from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. Nicole has also been an active member of EERI’s Learning from Earthquakes program, participating in field reconnaissance after the 2016 Cushing, Oklahoma earthquake and multiple virtual reconnaissance efforts (EERI-VERT).
