Rate My Professor Daniel Eisenberg

Daniel A. Eisenberg, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California, a position he assumed in July 2022. He also serves as Director of the NPS Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID) since January 2023, following his role as Deputy Director from 2019 to 2022. Prior to these faculty appointments at NPS, where he began as Research Assistant Professor in June 2018, Eisenberg was a Resilience Research Engineer at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Concord, Massachusetts, from January 2013 to March 2018. Earlier in his career, he held positions as a Fulbright Scholar at Polo Nacional Laboratories in Florianópolis, Brazil (March 2012–December 2012), Research Scientist at the University of California, Davis (January 2011–March 2012), International Research Fellow at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea (summers 2014 and 2015), and international research intern at Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brazil (June–August 2010).

Eisenberg earned his Ph.D. in Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering from Arizona State University in May 2018, with a dissertation titled 'How to Think About Resilient Infrastructure Systems,' advised by Thomas P. Seager and Jeryang Park. He previously received an M.S.E. from the same institution in May 2016 and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Music Performance (Percussion) from the University of California, Davis in December 2010. His research centers on resilience engineering applied to interdependent infrastructure systems, with a focus on vulnerability assessment, modeling compound threats, and adaptation strategies for military installations and island communities. Key publications include 'The ‘resilience curve’ is a poor model of resilience' (PNAS Nexus, 2025), 'What’s wrong with the Mission Dependency Index for U.S. federal infrastructure decisions?' (Risk Analysis, 2022), 'Rethinking Resilience Analytics' (Risk Analysis, 2019), 'In search of network resilience: An optimization-based view' (Networks, 2021), and 'The infrastructure trolley problem: Positioning safe-to-fail infrastructure for climate change adaptation' (Earth’s Future, 2019). Notable awards encompass the Meyer Award for Teaching Excellence in Systems Engineering (2024), MORS Wayne P. Hughes Award for Outstanding Junior Analyst (2023), Naval Postgraduate School Teaching Fellow (2018–2019), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2015–2018), and Fulbright Research Fellowship (2012–2013). His funded projects, supported by agencies such as SERDP-ESTCP and DHS, contribute to enhancing the resilience of critical U.S. military infrastructure.