ResilienceMaking Our Infrastructure Safer

By David L. Chandler

Published 7 December 2020

Saurabh Amin, a systems engineer at MIT, focuses on making transportation, electricity, and water infrastructure more resilient against disruptions. “There are a lot of commonalities among these networks — they are built and operated by human actors, but their functionality is governed by physical laws. So, that is what drives me forward,” Amin says.

Early on in his studies, starting in India and then in the U.S., Saurabh Amin became fascinated by bringing principles from mathematical systems theory to bear on the real-world systems that we all rely on — in particular, transportation, electricity, and water infrastructure — and how to make them more resilient.

As the types of disruptions facing these systems, from natural disasters to security attacks, become more frequent and diverse, a proactive approach to monitoring and controlling these systems becomes all the more important.  

Amin started to work on infrastructure systems as an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology at Roorkee, India’s oldest technology institute. Citing other alumni who came before him and contributed to important civil engineering projects around the world, he says, “I was fortunate to study there. I think our curriculum actually had a very good balance” between real-world engineering applications and theoretical understanding of core concepts.

Inspired by this balance of theory and applications, Amin decided to study transportation systems at the University of Texas at Austin for his masters. He then earned his PhD in systems engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, where he delved into control theory, machine learning, and robotics — areas that have all come together in his more recent research. He now applies these tools to his analyses of different failure mechanisms and pathways, including how to guard infrastructure systems against problems caused by aging, natural disasters, or deliberate malicious action.

“There are a lot of commonalities among these networks — they are built and operated by human actors, but their functionality is governed by physical laws. So, that is what drives me forward,” Amin says.

He seeks “to develop a rigorous theoretical foundation of the resilience of infrastructures, to come at it from different angles, and to understand which kind of network failures are difficult or easy to analyze, or to defend against.”

Amin received an offer for an assistant professor position at MIT while he was still finishing his doctoral work at Berkeley. He had met his wife, Richa Sharma, under MIT’s Great Dome during an earlier research visit at the Institute, where she was completing a doctorate in chemical engineering. But just as he was about to move to Cambridge, she received a postdoc position at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.