The University of Maryland’s Department of Mechanical Engineering welcomes Dr. Monifa Vaughn-Cooke as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Vaughn-Cooke received her B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2004 and her M.S. in Industrial Engineering in 2006 from the University of Southern California. She recently completed her Ph.D. at Penn State, where she focused on the application of human reliability tools to the healthcare system. Dr. Vaughn-Cooke’s interdisciplinary research synthesizes sociology, psychology, systems engineering and risk assessment; her research aims to identify the behavioral mechanisms associated with system risk propagation to inform the design of user-centric products and systems with the ultimate goal of improving productivity and safety. Read her CV here.