Ph.D. Candidate Omid Emamjomehzadeh's Flood-Risk Framework Gives New York a New Tool to Protect Its Roads
His research on the state's large culverts has earned him the NYU Urban Doctoral Fellowship, and a place in how New York plans for the next storm.
Omar Wani (left) and Omid Emamjomehzadeh (second from left), with fellow researchers from Wani's Hydrologic Systems Group Berina Kilicarslan and Mario Ponce Pacheco, in Poughkeepsie, New York on October 14, 2025. Wani and Emamjomehzadeh led a workshop there for New York State Department of Transportation regional managers.
Some of New York's large culverts, the structures that carry streams and drainage water underneath roads, can't handle the flood they're designed for.
That's a finding from Omid Emamjomehzadeh's research (the actual figure, it turns out, is about 16%), and it now gives the state a tool to prioritize which culverts to fix first.
Emamjomehzadeh is a Ph.D. candidate in Assistant Professor Omar Wani's lab at NYU Tandon. He studies how infrastructure fails to keep up with water, whether that means too little of it or too much. That focus dates back to his master's thesis, which tackled a water shortage affecting more than a million people in Tehran.
"I really cared about solving a real problem," he said. "There wasn't enough clean water for them, and the question was: how were we going to solve that? That was my thesis."
That same instinct followed him to NYU, where he was drawn to Wani's lab specifically because its work spanned two directions. "One part of the lab was focused on decision-making under uncertainty in hydrological systems, and another was more about hydroclimatic risk of urban systems," he said. "I got experience in both, and I realized I was more inclined toward solving an urban problem by using mathematical methods, machine learning, and deep learning."
His pull toward urban problems and computational methods is exactly what shows up in the culvert work. He and Wani published a statewide risk assessment, grounded in hydrology but built on large-scale data analysis, in Communications Earth & Environment earlier this year.
The work fills a notable gap. New York State has thousands of large culverts, but hasn't had a systematic way to know which ones were most at risk of failing during a major storm.
The framework Emamjomehzadeh and Wani built pulls together terabytes of geospatial and hydrological data to flag the culverts most likely to fail, and also finds risk patterns: culverts on main roads, in smaller watersheds, and built more recently tend to hold up better, while those exposed to coastal rainfall patterns and wetter soil conditions are more vulnerable.
Emamjomehzadeh’s candid about not having every next step mapped out. Asked about life after the Ph.D., he mentioned postdocs, startups, and industry roles.
"I'm open to all of it," he said. "What matters to me is that the problem I address is complex and real."
For his culvert work, Emamjomehzadeh has been named a recipient of the NYU Urban Doctoral Fellowship through the NYU Urban Initiative, which recognizes doctoral students across NYU whose research advances understanding of urban challenges.
"Sometimes when we do research, we just don't know how good we're doing," he said. "This award is a confirmation that I’m making real progress."
