Friday Fellow Feature: Zaira Pagán-Cajigas

Our Featured Fellow for June 2025 is Zaira Pagán-Cajigas. Zaira recently obtained her Ph.D. in Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) from the University of Michigan, where she also completed her master’s degree. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Zaira’s journey into disaster research was inspired by the lived experiences of her community during Hurricane Maria in 2017. Witnessing the profound and lasting disruptions to essential services motivated her to focus her work on quantifying the impact of natural hazards on the functionality and accessibility of critical services and infrastructure.

In her dissertation, she developed the AccES framework (Predicting Loss of Access to Essential Services), a data-driven, scalable, and community-informed tool that assesses building-level loss of access to essential services. What distinguishes her work is the exclusive use of publicly available data, empowering communities, especially those with limited infrastructure information, to analyze and improve their resilience. The framework also integrates local stakeholder knowledge through interviews and surveys, ensuring the results reflect community-specific needs and priorities.

In addition to AccES, Zaira has developed synthetic infrastructure models, including a water distribution network built entirely from public data to simulate hazard impacts on household-level water access. Additionally, she has collaborated with governmental and private entities, applying predictive models to estimate tropical cyclone-induced power outages under future climate scenarios to identify high outage risk areas in the United States.

Her research has been published in the Risk Analysis and Energy Research & Social Science journals. She has presented her work at over ten national and international conferences and delivered invited talks at institutions like the University of Stavanger in Norway.

In 2024, Zaira became a Bill Anderson Fund (BAF) Fellow, where she contributes to the Writing Committee, helping other fellows elevate their research through impactful writing. She is also a Rackham Merit Fellow and a Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) Scholar.
Zaira’s dedication to equity in STEM goes beyond research. At the University of Michigan, she taught an undergraduate Operations Research course. She has also served as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Chair for INFORMS and as the DEI Student Representative in her department, where she worked on initiatives to make academic spaces more inclusive.

She actively mentors aspiring graduate students through the IOE Graduate Application Mentoring Program, guiding undergraduates and master’s students through the graduate school admissions process. As part of her ongoing outreach, she leads efforts through SHPE, organizing hands-on activities that connect underrepresented students to STEM pathways. Zaira also volunteers as a facilitator for Kids Who Code, where she teaches introductory Python programming to high school students from underserved communities across the U.S., helping them build confidence and foundational skills in computer science.

Zaira Pagán-Cajigas exemplifies the BAF mission through her dedication to socially engaged research, inclusive mentoring, and her drive to build more equitable, resilient communities.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: The intersection of data analysis, risk and resilience assessments, and infrastructure modeling, using simulation and probabilistic risk assessment to evaluate how natural hazards impact access to critical services.