Tess Hegarty

Tess Hegarty is a PhD student in the civil and environmental engineering department at Stanford. Since undergrad, she has been passionate about improving the sustainability of the built environment through research. Her current research focuses on applying a probabilistic approach to quantifying sustainability indicators for various conventional and industrialized housing types. This includes a collaboration with MIT architecture and industry partners for the CARBONHOUSE project, an effort to explore the sustainability of homes built with innovative carbon-carbon composites. During her time in grad school, she spent a summer at EPFL's Structural Exploration Lab, working on the Build-Unbuild-Repeat project, which focuses on bringing circular economy principles into building design.

In 2019, Tess completed a master's degree in structural engineering from Stanford University, directly after earning her bachelor's degree in civil and environmental engineering at MIT in 2017. During undergrad, she embraced opportunities to study and research abroad, including participating in a year-long exchange program at Cambridge University. Her undergrad research at MIT and Imperial College London focused on employing parametric modeling to quantify the embodied carbon of structures. In her final year at MIT, she was granted a departmental award for Best Undergrad Research, in addition to receiving an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and Stanford Graduate Fellowship. Since high school, Tess has worked to increase diverse representation in STEM careers, which was the focus of her Girl Scout Gold Award project and has guided her continued participation in the Society of Women Engineers.