With Covid-19 shelving her go-to leisure activities like playing soccer and meeting friends for coffee, the PhD student turned to books in her spare time and decided reread one of her favorites: BUILT by Roma Agrawal.

“This book made me fall in love with structural engineering again,” Warren said.

In 2020, Warren was selected as one of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Future Faculty Fellows. The four-year-old program supports students pursuing careers in academia through a $1,000 stipend to guide their development as educators and help them build their research and professional relationships.

But like soccer and coffee shops, Covid-19 took traveling to conferences off the table, and spending the money to attend virtual conferences just didn’t have the same appeal for Warren.

So she came up with the idea of bringing the CEE community together for a book club to read and talk about the book that had been so influential for her.