Jessica Boakye is a research assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and a member of the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring.
IALS: Hi Jessica, thank you for speaking with us today. We have a few questions for you so everyone on campus can get to know you better. How long have you been at UMass Amherst?
JB: I started as a Pathways Postdoc in 2020 then became an Assistant Professor in 2022. I also did my undergrad here from 2014-2020 so it's fun for my students when they realize that we (may) have had the same professors.
IALS: Where did you grow up?
JB: Norwood, Massachusetts
IALS: Does the love of science run in your family?
JB: Yes, kind of! My father is a professional geotechnical engineer. My mom majored in economics. My brother is a graphic designer.
IALS: How long have you been teaching?
JB: I taught my first college class in the Spring of 2021 from my kitchen table.
IALS: What is more stressful, grant proposals, research, or teaching?
JB: Grant proposals.
IALS: Assuming your research is widely successful, how will it impact society?
JB: My work centers around networks and criticality. I envision much of our world as a system of networks where some components are more critical than others. I try to find those critical components and strengthen them or add components to the existing system to make them better. This can be everything from figuring out which bridge failure is most likely to disconnect vulnerable populations from the hospital to using common graph theory metrics to visualize, identify, and mitigate bottlenecks in maternal care.
IALS: Who do you admire and why?
JB: I really admire my mom. She grew up in rural Mississippi and was one of eight children. She went to Tougaloo college, an HBCU, because it was close to home and it was where her older sister went. She didn't consider other colleges. But then, she got the opportunity to get a master's at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and just got on a bus and left. I also went to UIUC for grad school but my parents met there and came with me wearing matching t-shirts. It wasn't scary, I'd grown up hearing about it. But for her to just go out and do that by herself takes a lot of courage! And it's how I got here so that's pretty cool.
IALS: What are your interests when you are not a scientist?
JB: I really enjoy baking, biking, watching sports, and (somewhat embarassingly) Hallmark mystery movies.
IALS: Thank you so much Jessica, and congratulations!
Learn more about Prof. Boakye's research.