Atefe Habibi is a PhD student in Civil Engineering, specializing in geotechnical engineering. Her experience covers landslides, slope stability, and climate change-related geohazards, and she uses GIS and remote sensing to map and analyze hazards across large areas. This background sparked her interest in how a warming climate changes the ground infrastructure is built on.
Her doctoral research focuses on permafrost thaw beneath the Hudson Bay Railway in northern Manitoba, the only overland link to Churchill. She is building a record of the sinkholes that have formed along the line and combining field, remote sensing, and climate data in machine learning models. The models will predict where new sinkholes are likely to form under different climate scenarios. Her goal is a practical tool that helps the railway plan maintenance before track failures happen. Through NSERC CREATE LEAP, she hopes to learn from northern partners and from researchers in other disciplines, and to share her work in ways that are useful beyond academia.
