NSF Bridge Workshop
Steering Committee
Catherine E. Wolfgram French
I.T. Distinguished Professor
Department of Civil Engineering
University of Minnesota
Faculty Homepage
Dr. French received her B.C.E. from the University of Minnesota in 1979 and her M.S.C.E. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1980 and 1984, respectively. She joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1984. Her research addresses the behavior of reinforced and prestressed concrete structural systems, numerical and experimental investigations of bridges including field monitoring, investigations of structural systems subjected to earthquake effects, evaluation and repair of damaged structures, and development and application of new materials. She is a Fellow of ACI, PCI, and recipient of the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, ACI Henry L. Kennedy Award, ACI Reinforced Concrete Research Council Arthur J. Boase Award, and ASCE Raymond C. Reese Research Prize.
Hamid Ghasemi
Senior Research Structural Engineer
Federal Highway Administration Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center
McLean, VA
Named FHWA Engineer of the Year
Long-Term Bridge Performance Program (TFHRC)
Dr. Ghasemi received his B.S. and M.S. from the University of Louisville, and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. He joined the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in 1992 and is a senior research structural engineer at the FHWA's Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center. He is currently the FHWA Long-Term Bridge Performance Program Manager. He has been involved in numerous research studies which address the needs of the highway community, with emphasis on seismic factors, computer modeling, and structural analysis. His research interests include passive and active structural control, and modal analysis and testing for non-destructive evaluation of bridges. He has served as a technical panel member on the HITEC program for evaluation and performance characteristics of seismic isolation and energy dissipation systems, where he was instrumental in developing the test plan for this program as well as analyzing the test data, and providing the summary report for this program. Dr. Ghasemi was also a member of the T-3 AASHTO technical committee that developed the guide specifications for seismic isolation design. He also has years of research experience on the dynamic behavior of curved bridges. In 2000, he was FHWA Engineer of the Year for 2000 and has received the agency's Engineering Excellence Award.
Chenyang Lu
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Washington University
St. Louis
Chenyang Lu Faculty Bio
Chenyang Lu Faculty Homepage
Chenyang Lu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University, St. Louis. Professor Lu received his B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1995, his M.S. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1997, and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2001. His research interests include real-time embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. He is the author and co-author of more than 70 publications. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in 2005 and a Best Paper Award at International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems in 2006. Professor Lu is Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks and International Journal of Sensor Networks, and Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Real-Time Wireless Sensor Networks of Real-Time Systems Journal. He also served on the organizational committees of a number of conferences, including as Program Chair of IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium in 2008, Demo Chair of ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems in 2005, and Track Chair of IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium in 2007.
Ali Maher
Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Rutgers U
Piscataway, NJ
Ali Maher Faculty Homepage
Dr. Maher received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from The University of Michigan in 1978, 1985, and 1988, respectively, and a M.S. from Northeastern U in 1980. He is a Professor at Rutgers University in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research addresses experimental soil mechanics; soil improvement; geo-environmental engineering; and infrastructure engineering. He has published more than 100 articles and research papers on these subjects. He is currently serving as Director of the Rutgers Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT) and is Principal Investigator of the FHWA-funded Long-Term Bridge Performance program that aims to create a high-quality database on bridge performance.
Billie F. Spencer, Jr.
Professor, Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair of Civil Engineering
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Smart Structures Technology Laboratry (SSTL)
Billie F. Spencer Faculty Homepage
Bill Spencer is the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair of Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Spencer received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from U Missouri-Rolla in 1981, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1983 and 1985, respectively. He was a member of the faculty at the University of Notre Dame for 17 years and joined the UIUC Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty in 2002. His research has addressed stochastic fatigue, stochastic computational mechanics, earthquake engineering, damage detection and health monitoring, and civil engineering applications of smart structures technology. He has authored two books: On the Reliability of Nonlinear Hysteretic Structures Subjected to Broadband Random Excitation (Springer-Verlag 1986) and Random Fatigue: From Data to Theory (Academic Press 1992) coauthored with Prof. K. Sobczyk. He is a Fellow of ASCE, an elected Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the North American Editor in Chief of Smart Structures and Systems, and is currently the president of the Asia-Pacific Network of Centers for Research on Smart Structures Technologies (ANCRSST).
Bozidar Stojadinovic
Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of California - Berkeley
Bozidar Stojadinovic Faculty Homepage
Dr. Stojadinovic received his B.S. from University of Belgrade (Serbia) in 1988, M.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) in 1990, and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1995, in civil engineering. He was a member of the faculty at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor for four years and joined the UC Berkeley Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty in 2000. His research addresses the seismic behavior of structural systems, probabilistic performance-based seismic design tools, development of hybrid experimental methods, integration of wireless sensor data into a framework for evaluation of structure states after extreme events, and applications of augmented reality for detecting and managing hazard imperceptible by human senses. He is a Fellow of ACI, and recipient of the ASCE Walter L. Huber Research Prize, UC- Berkeley Presidential Chair Fellow Award, and NSF Career Award.