The Grand Challengers Podcast Episode #60

Embracing failure to build resilience – critical infrastructure, nature and the human spirit

Guest: Maryam Imani

April 7th, 2026

Overview

Why do some cities descend into chaos during storms while others bounce back within hours? The answer often lies not in any single system, but in the invisible connections between them, and whether the people responsible for water, energy and transport are actually working together when things go wrong.

Dr Maryam Imani, Associate Professor of Water Systems Engineering at Anglia Ruskin University, has spent her career investigating exactly these questions. As a Co-Investigator on the NERC-funded RV-DSS project, Maryam helped develop a resilience and vulnerability-informed decision support framework that models how failures propagate across interdependent water, energy and transport networks. Using a case study from North Argyll, Scotland, her research demonstrated a striking finding: while greater infrastructure interdependency increases vulnerability to cascading failures, it simultaneously creates opportunities for “shared interventions”. These entail collaborative recovery strategies that can dramatically improve system resilience. Her work shows that when one asset fails, the impact can cascade through interconnected systems, knocking out services, blocking emergency access and extending recovery times. But with coordinated planning between operators, these same connections become pathways for faster, more effective responses.

The conversation then expands into the world of nature-based solutions (NBS) and sustainable drainage systems (SuDS). Through her role as Principal Investigator of the UKRI-funded RESoURce@Brandia project, Maryam has worked with communities in São Carlos, Brazil and Chennai, India, to implement resilience-informed SuDS that address flooding, water quality and quality of life. She draws powerful comparisons between the UK, Brazil and India, revealing how informal settlements in the Global South often demonstrate greater adaptive capacity and willingness to embrace flexible solutions, while the Global North grapples with heritage constraints, adoption challenges and institutional barriers. As SuDS become recognised as critical infrastructure, Maryam raises an important concern: do we truly understand their long-term performance? Her pioneering SuDS Health Monitoring research at ARU combines experimental lab models with AI-driven analysis to develop predictive maintenance tools, work she describes as essential to ensuring nature-based solutions do not simply shift today’s problems into tomorrow’s legacy failures.

Maryam connects professional and personal resilience. A former competitive taekwondo athlete who earned a black belt and represented the national team in Iran, Maryam’s journey through structural engineering, a startup that ended in perceived failure, and the tragic loss of her brother in a motorcycle accident has given her a deeply personal understanding of the resilience she studies. Her decision to eventually sit on a motorcycle again, facing her deepest fear, became a turning point. As she puts it: “sometimes you need to run towards your fears in order to discover change.” The episode closes with Maryam reciting Sadi Shirazi’s 13th-century poem “Bani Adam” (Children of Adam), inscribed at the United Nations, drawing a powerful parallel between human interconnectedness and the interdependent infrastructure systems that sustain our cities.

Episode Teaser

In this preview of Episode 60, Dr Maryam Imani shares why understanding cascading infrastructure failures is essential for building resilient cities and how personal setbacks taught her that resilience is not about being tough, but about being adaptive. From taekwondo to critical infrastructure, nature-based solutions to a 13th-century Persian poem, this episode weaves together engineering, ecology and the human spirit of overcoming adversity.

Biography

“…It is not about being tough, it is about being adaptive and being a bit flexible to change when needed…”

Dr Maryam Imani is an Associate Professor (Reader) of Water Systems Engineering at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in the UK and Chair of the IWA Working Group on ‘Alliance for Water Sensitive Design & Planning’. A Chartered Civil Engineer with a BEng in Civil Engineering from the University of Semnan, Iran, Maryam initially worked in structural engineering before pivoting to water systems. She earned her MEng in Water Systems Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) and her PhD from the University of Exeter’s Centre for Water Systems (CWS), where she worked with leading researchers including Professors Zoran Kapelan and David Butler. Her research focuses on water infrastructure resilience, critical infrastructure interdependency and sustainable drainage systems (SuDS), applying computational modelling, machine learning and evolutionary optimization to tackle complex urban water challenges.

Maryam leads several international research collaborations spanning the UK, Brazil and India, exploring how nature-based solutions can be designed for resilient, climate-adaptive cities. She is the Principal Investigator of the RESoURce@Brandia project, which incorporates SuDS into peri-urban areas in Brazil and India, and a Co-Investigator on the RV-DSS project, which developed a resilience and vulnerability-informed decision support framework for interdependent critical infrastructure networks. Maryam is also pioneering work on SuDS Health Monitoring, combining computational and experimental methods to understand long-term maintenance and performance of green drainage infrastructure. A former competitive taekwondo athlete who reached black belt Dan 1 and represented the national team in Iran, Maryam brings the same discipline and resilience to her academic career. She is a Steering Committee Member of the IWA Nature-Based Solutions Cluster, an ICE Essex Committee Member, and the recipient of the ICE East of England STEM Ambassador of the Year Award (2019).

Dr Maryam Imani headshot – Associate Professor of Water Systems Engineering at Anglia Ruskin University, infrastructure resilience and SuDS researcher

Quick Summary & Highlights

  • Cascading infrastructure failures explained: How a single flood event can trigger chain reactions across water, energy and transport networks and why infrastructure operators need shared intervention strategies to improve recovery.
  • The RV-DSS decision support framework: A resilience and vulnerability-informed tool developed with Scottish Water, Transport Scotland and Scottish & Southern Energy that maps interdependencies and quantifies resilience across critical infrastructure networks.
  • Nature-based solutions across three continents: Insights from the RESoURce@Brandia project comparing SuDS adoption in the UK, Brazil and India, and why the Global South’s adaptive, community-driven approaches offer valuable lessons for the Global North.
  • SuDS Health Monitoring – an emerging frontier: Maryam’s pioneering research combines lab-based models with AI-driven analysis and smart sensors to predict maintenance hotspots, aiming to prevent nature-based infrastructure from becoming tomorrow’s legacy problem.
  • Personal resilience as a framework: From competitive taekwondo and a failed startup to facing her deepest fear after a family tragedy, Maryam’s journey shows that resilience, whether personal or infrastructural, is about being adaptive, not invincible.

Resources Related to the Episode

Key Research & Publications

  • Hajializadeh, D. and Imani, M. (2021). RV-DSS: Towards a Resilience and Vulnerability-informed Decision Support System Framework for Interdependent Infrastructure Systems. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 156, 107276. [Link]
  • Imani, M. and Hajializadeh, D. (2020). A resilience assessment framework for critical infrastructure networks’ interdependencies. Water Science and Technology, 81(7), 1420–1431. [Link]
  • McClymont, K. et al. (2020). Towards urban resilience through Sustainable Drainage Systems: A multi-objective optimisation problem. Journal of Environmental Management. [Link]
  • Imani, M., Brambleby, R. and Maktabdar Oghaz, M. (2024). Health monitoring: a pathway to improved sustainable drainage system maintenance. Blue-Green Systems, 6(2), 345–358. [Link]
  • Vasconcelos, A.F. et al. (2022). Barriers to sustainable urban stormwater management in developing countries: The case of Brazil. Journal of Land Use Policy, 112, 105821. [Link]
  • Butler, D. et al. (2017). Reliable, resilient and sustainable water management: the Safe & SuRe approach. Journal of Global Challenges, 1(1), 63–77. [Link]
  • Holling, C.S. (1973). Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23. [Link]

Institutions & Projects

Background & Context

Cultural & Personal References

Episode Chapters

(Chapters are embedded in the episode for quick access, click this to expand and view all chapters and time stamps)
  • 0:00 Intro
  • 1:59 Guest Intro & Action Hobbies
  • 12:47 Lego inspired a start in structural engineering
  • 19:00 From structure to water, from CEO to researcher
  • 25:27 Unpacking Resilience & Interdependency and the RVDSS
  • 35:52 What is infrastructure resilience?
  • 45:02 The NbS Terminology discussion
  • 47:25 Maryam’s international NbS Research
  • 56:29 NbS as Critical Infrastructure – what about resilience?
  • 1:00:12 UK, Brazil, India comparison in terms of NbS
  • 1:05:02 The key lesson for Global North-South learning
  • 1:06:33 Maryam’s future plans
  • 1:09:05 Q&A Start
  • 1:09:24 What does innovation mean to you?
  • 1:11:32 Key event, book person
  • 1:13:57 Time Management
  • 1:17:23 Favourite childhood memory
  • 1:18:30 Biggest challenge to date
  • 1:21:19 Advice for young professionals
  • 1:23:24 What would you most like to be remembered for?
  • 1:24:36 Where can people find you?
  • 1:25:04 Final message
  • 1:27:41 Outro

Connect with Maryam Imani

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Credits