Javiera Barrera

Sistemas Multienergéticos

Javiera Barrera is an associate professor at the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences in Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (UAI). She holds a double Ph.D. degree from Université Paris-Descartes and Universidad de Chile. She has an undergraduate degree in Mathematical Engineering, which she obtained from Universidad de Chile as well. Javiera is the Chilean RAREDEP research project coordinator, where researchers from Uruguay, Brazil, and France study the simulation of dependent failures using rare event techniques. She is also an associate researcher in a collaborative project such as the Operations Research In Energy & Climate Change, Stochastic Models of Disordered and Complex Systems, and other research projects. Her research interests combine stochastic processes, stochastic optimization, and reliable network design. She has made important contributions to understanding the asymptotic phenomenon called cut-off, which corresponds to the abrupt convergence to the stationarity in certain Markov chains. She has also contributed to the reliability network literature, developing new methods to design and evaluate networks that incorporate geographical dependencies in failures and rare event simulation techniques. Her research has been published in prestigious journals such as Mathematical Programming, Annals of Operations Research, IEEE transactions on reliability, and Annals of Applied Probability. She was awarded the Eshbach Scholar for a visiting associated professor position at Industrial Engineering and Management science department in Northwestern University.
Her main administrative duties at the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences have been creating and directing master programs. During the last two years, she was in charge of the academic coordination of all the scientific postgraduate programs our faculty. Her main achievement in these two years was implementing a program that allowed triple the postgraduate level recruitment. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in stochastic processes. She has supervised more than 20 undergraduate students, five master thesis and one postdoc.
From the beginning of her career, she has participated in outreach activities giving talks to different audiences at museums, radio programs, newspapers interviews, schools, among others. Since 2014 she joined forces with other females mathematicians and founded the “Colectivo de Mujeres Matematicas de Chile”. Together they have carried out in Chile and Latin-America several activities to communicate women’s role in math.