UCI Engineering Professor Honored with Prestigious Egleston Medal
By Anna Lynn Spitzer
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July 14, 2004 -- Masanobu Shinozuka, UCI Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering within the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine, has been selected as the 2004 Egleston Medal recipient from Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association. Shinozuka is an active participant in Calit² Irvine division's environment and civil infrastructure research layer.
The Egleston Medal, established in 1939, is the highest honor bestowed by the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association. The medal is awarded in recognition of distinguished engineering achievement that has significantly advanced the recipient's branch of the profession or the practice or management of engineering activities in general. "I feel highly honored to join a special group of Columbia Engineering School Alumni, including Raymond Mindlin and Daniel Drucker, giants in continuum mechanics research, Leon Moisseiff and David Steinman, world renown suspension bridge designers, and Charles Brinckerhoff, the greatest engineer in modern infrastructure construction management, to name only a few and only from the Columbia Engineering School's Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics" said Shinozuka.
The applications for Professor Shinozuka's work are in earthquake and structural engineering in buildings, bridges, lifeline and environmental systems. His work highlights the multidisciplinary aspects of infrastructure system problems. Professor Shinozuka's research interests include continuum mechanics, micromechanics, stochastic processes and fields, structural dynamics and control, earthquake and wind engineering. He also studies systems engineering, with an emphasis on structural and system reliability, risk assessment of lifeline systems including water, electrical power and transportation networks and the analysis of socio-economic impacts of natural disasters. Additionally, Professor Shinozuka is interested in advanced technologies such as remote sensing and GIS for disaster assessment and mitigation, smart materials and structures and nondestructive evaluation.
Professor Shinozuka has been a member of National Academy of Engineering since 1978 and contributed to the development of a national vision for engineering research, education and practice. He functions in a leadership capacity to many academic and research oriented groups including Chairman, Executive Committee for the NSF Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research and President, International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability. Also, as Honorary Member of American Society of Civil Engineers since 1993, he has served on many ASCE technical, administrative and management committees to enhance the level of sophistication of the profession. He is author of "Stochastic Processes and Fields; Theory and Applications" under contract with Cambridge University Press, and editor of the Journal of Probabilistic Engineering Mechanics.