Bio: Professor Frieder Seible is the Dean of the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering and holds the Eric and Johanna Reissner Chair in Applied Mechanics and Structural Engineering. Seible is also co-chair of Calit2's Governing Board. He developed and directs the Charles Lee Powell Structural Research Laboratories, which serve as a worldwide resource for full-scale testing and analysis of structures. Seible is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the CERF Charles Pankow Award for Innovation. He has served on or led many Caltrans committees on bridge reconstruction and retrofit. Seible has published more than 500 papers and technical reports mainly related to seismic design of bridges and buildings. Seible received a Dpl. Ing. from the University of Stuttgart, a M.Sc. from the University of Calgary, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, all in civil engineering. Before joining UCSD, Seible was a design engineer at Philipp Holzmann AG in Frankfurt, Germany.

Research: Among his many recent research projects, Dean Seible is working with Caltrans to test components for the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge East Bay Span, which was destroyed in an earthquake in 1989. He is also applying earthquake retrofit technologies to protect high-risk buildings from terrorist bomb blasts. Working with a number of collaborators, Seible is also investigating the use of wireless sensors to monitor bridge safety. Seible has recently designed a new construction system comprised of hollow composite tubes filled with more traditional materials such as concrete. The system was used when California built the world's first composite bridge for heavy traffic.