She received her Ph.D. Degree in Computer Engineering from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, in 2011 where she was awarded the Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement for her doctoral thesis on large-scale parallel simulation. For the past eight years she has been conducting research on discrete-event modeling and simulation, distributed and parallel simulation, software engineering, and integrated modeling environments. Dr. Jafar has been previously involved in projects dealing with modeling and simulation of natural disasters as well as emergency response to natural fire. She is currently conducting research in disaster engineering, modeling and simulation in aviation, and large-scale NAS (National Airspace System) data analysis with the NEAR Lab as a part of the FAA’s NextGen projects.