Notarianni New Director of WPI Fire Center

      Kathy Notarianni (EPP Ph.D. 2000) has been named Director of the Center for Fire Safety Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). She will be the Center’s second director succeeding founding director, David A. Lucht, who steps down after 25 years.

Notarianni holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and an M.S. in Fire Protection from WPI and served for 15 years in the fire science division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST made special
	Kathy Notarianni

arrangements to allow her to pursue a Ph.D. in EPP under the supervision of Paul Fischbeck (SDS/ EPP). Using NIST’s high speed computers and a family of NIST fire models, Notarianni implemented the first stochastic simulation to explore the feasibility of performance-based fire codes. Upon her return to NIST, she played an important role in bringing modern methods of risk analysis to the NIST fire science division.
      As director of the Center for Firesafety Studies at WPI, Notarianni will work with the university’s fire protection engineering faculty to plan future graduate studies and research. She will build upon the Center’s working relationships with offcampus agencies, laboratories, universities and companies having common interest in fire protection engineering education and research. She will also monitor industry needs for fire protection engineering graduates, and recruit young men and women who can be trained to meet those needs.

Cranor/Farber - continued from pg. 1

	Prof. Farber joined Carnegie Mellon after retiring in 2003 as the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems at the University of Pennsylvania where he held appointments as
Dave Farber

Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Wharton School and as a Faculty Associate of the Annenberg School of Communication.
      On January 17, 2000, he was appointed Chief Technologist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission while on leave from UPenn. Farber was recently appointed a member of the three-person Security Advisory Board of PJM, the electricity system coordinator for the central Atlantic region. He serves as Chief Scientist for National LambdaRail, a major initiative to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications. While at UPenn, he co-directed The Penn Initiative on Markets, Technology and Policy. He was also Director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL) where he managed leading edge research in Ultra High Speed Networking. Research papers of the DSL are available in its electronic library.
      Farber graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1956 and then spent eleven years at Bell Laboratories where he helped design the first electronic switching system and the SNOBOL language. He then went west to The Rand Corporation and to Scientific Data Systems prior to moving to academia.