Raul Rincon
I am an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, joining in Fall 2026, where I am building the Rincon Research Group. The group develops computational and probabilistic methods for resilient, adaptive, and equitable infrastructure systems, so that urban infrastructure performs safely and fairly now and into the future. I envision a move toward systemic approaches that enable us to focus on the complex, uncertain, and evolving interactions among societies, infrastructure systems, and environmental stressors. I aim to provide tools to enhance the performance and resilience of civil infrastructure systems while ensuring that preexisting inequities in social systems are not exacerbated by misinformed decision-making.
Prior to joining CU Boulder, I was a Postdoctoral Associate at Rice University while visiting Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. I received my Ph.D. from Rice University in August 2025, working under the supervision of Dr. Jamie Ellen Padgett. Before my doctoral work, I spent three years as a full-time lecturer and researcher at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, contributing to national-scale projects on seismic risk assessment of schools, bridges, and critical infrastructure. My work has ranged from analyzing real-world structural failures and the mechanistic performance of structural members to probabilistic analysis of systems composed of multiple levels of components.
If you are interested in joining the group as a PhD student or collaborating on research, please visit the Join page.
Awards
- 2026 — Ralph Budd Thesis Award, Brown School of Engineering and Computing, Rice University
- 2025 — IASSAR Best Student Paper Award (Infrastructure Analysis), 14th International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability (ICOSSAR’25)
- 2024 — Future Faculty Fellow, George R. Brown School of Engineering, Rice University
- 2024 — 1st Place, EMI Objective Resilience Student Paper/Presentation Competition (EMI/PMC 2024), Chicago
- 2023 — Robert P. & Eleanor Warden Shubinski Scholarship, Rice University
- 2021 — H. W. Reeves Endowed Scholarship, Rice University
- 2020 — Fulbright-Minciencias Scholarship, Colombia–USA (2020 cohort)
- 2019 — Innovative Teacher Recognition, Universidad de los Andes
- 2018 — Outstanding Journal Paper Award, ASCE Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
- 2009 — Mario Galán Gómez Scholarship, ECOPETROL (top 2 students per department), Colombia