The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering is proud to celebrate two faculty promotions recognizing outstanding achievements in research, teaching, and service. Dr. Marina Astitha has been promoted to Professor, and Dr. Diego Cerrai has been promoted to Associate Professor.
Dr. Astitha’s promotion reflects her leadership in atmospheric modeling and environmental systems research. Her work focuses on integrating numerical weather prediction systems with machine learning to improve the forecasting of extreme weather events and other high-impact atmospheric conditions.
“I am inspired by the human ability to define physical laws and solve environmental problems, and I am driven by a new frontier where atmospheric physics meets artificial intelligence in the pursuit of describing environmental phenomena with greater precision and purpose,” Astitha said.
Astitha serves as the Eversource Energy Professor in Environmental and Sustainability Education and is affiliated with both the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Eversource Energy Center. Her research continues to advance innovative approaches to atmospheric science, artificial intelligence, and environmental resilience.
Dr. Cerrai’s promotion recognizes his growing impact in weather analytics, power grid resilience, and precipitation science. His research focuses on precipitation measurements and microphysics, power outage prediction and restoration, renewable energy integration, and infrastructure resilience.
“I have been looking at the sky since I was a child, and I turned my curiosity into my profession,” Cerrai said. “What inspires me now is helping students understand the forces that shape our weather and how it affects our daily lives.”
Cerrai recently received a prestigious NSF CAREER Award and has led projects funded by NASA, NSF, and major energy companies. He is currently leading the North American Outage Prediction Model (NA-OPM) project, which aims to predict power outages across the United States and Canada.
Cerrai also serves as the University lead for NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement Mission Ground Validation Campaign in the northeastern United States, helping improve satellite precipitation data products through field-based snowfall measurement and analysis.
The School congratulates both faculty members on these well-deserved promotions and looks forward to their continued leadership, innovation, and contributions to the civil and environmental engineering field.
Diego Cerrai, Ph.D. 
