Presenter

Dr. Maryam Tabibzadeh is a Professor in the Department of Manufacturing Systems Engineering and Management at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN). Her research has been focused on risk analysis in complex safety-critical and technology-intensive industries, such as offshore drilling, healthcare, and transportation sectors. Investigating the role of human and organizational factors (HOFs), along with technological elements, in those industries has been a major focus of her research projects. In the offshore drilling industry, she has developed systematic incident investigation frameworks and (both qualitative and quantitative) risk assessment methodologies to analyze the critical role of HOFs in the safety of offshore drilling operations. In the healthcare industry, she has conducted research on patient safety and development of proactive risk assessment methodologies to enhance safety culture and improve quality of care. Some examples of related research projects are systematic investigation of adverse events and outbreaks using the AcciMap framework, risk assessment of medical errors including unintended retained foreign objects and wrong site surgery in operating rooms, and analysis of barriers of high quality of care in telehealth implementation.

Dr. Tabibzadeh has presented and published papers in the areas of risk assessment and safety management, systematic accident investigation and prevention, and interoperability analysis of multiple emergency response agencies in peer-reviewed conferences and journals. She has also supervised more than 40 students in different research projects and published papers with them. As part of her accomplishments, she received the Outstanding Engineering Achievement Merit Award in 2018, 2024, and 2026 and the Distinguished Engineering Educator Award in 2022 from The Engineers’ Council. She was one of the selected Early-Career Research Fellows (2024-2025), for the Offshore Energy Safety Track, at the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She was also the College of Engineering and Computer Science’s Research Fellow at CSUN in 2021-2022 and the Easton Foundation Faculty Fellow in 2019-2020. Dr. Tabibzadeh received her Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California.