Eddie Brooks Email and Phone Number

Natural Catastrophe Specialist on the Catastrophe Perils team, primarily focusing on earthquake-related hazards. Roles include tool development, assessment, and upgrading for earthquake and wildfire hazard modeling. Expert on parametric insurance modeling and support.

Primary work focuses on the assessment of earthquake hazard maps, and quantifying their performance. Current work involves working with federal agencies to lead assessment of modern changes to hazard mapping methodology to account for induced seismic events from fracking, wastewater injection, and other man-made actions. This is assisted through a novel method developed for comparing spatial probability distributions for evaluating the performance of earthquake hazard maps. Results are found in eight co-authored papers for publication in peer-reviewed journals, four as lead author (one currently in press), and eleven talks and posters at international conferences, twice as invited speaker. Worked as teaching assistant for four classes in geophysics, geology, seismology, and data science; responsibilities included leading laboratory experiments, writing and grading assignments, and holding weekly office hoursI am a three-time recipient of Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research Graduate Assistant Fellowship, and a recipient of Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences’ Horace S. Scott Graduate Award for Outstanding Research.

Worked with Global Data Insights and Analytis team. Researched the performance of electric vehicle batteries over time to study degradation trends in performance. Developed a modeling procedure to forecast lifetime performance of batteries in electric vehicles for warranty analysis, as well as methods to extrapolate and repair incomplete and missing data, expanding usable dataset by 20%. Determined multiple metrics for battery health to reduce noise in data by using uncertainty analysis. Upon completion, I worked in Hadoop and Hive to scale procedure from local MATLAB environment up to working in Big Data setting, and laid the framework for visualization and distribution of information on vehicle behavior in QlikView.

Earth science intern working for Chevron's Energy Technology Company. Lead investigation into utility of machine learning techniques for industry, with an emphasis on deep learning. Developed software to demonstrate use of image recognition techniques in upstream sector using Google’s TensorFlow language.

I helped oversee a five-week course in special relativity with sixty rising high school seniors, as well as a lab course covering topics in modern physics, and electives in Laser Technology and Foundations of Music. Weekly tasks included grading homework, overseeing class lectures, and offering large-scale and one-on-one homework help sessions. In addition, I oversaw a group of nine students in a collaborative team project building a theremin, which acted as an introduction to circuitry, culminating in a presentation and twenty-page paper. Outside of academic responsibilities, staff members were tasked with overseeing dorm life for the students, which involved planning student activities, guiding students during travel, mediating conflict, and enforcing dorm rules.

I assisted in teaching class on a weekly basis, writing programs to automate class grading, held weekly office hours, graded exams, and supplied additional help where needed. Class topics included: Unix & Bash, Python, and MATLAB.