Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Reston, Va.—Dan M. Frangopol, Sc.D., P.E., Dr.h.c, Dist.M.ASCE, the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University, was recently named a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). ASCE’s highest accolade, distinguished membership recognizes eminence in a branch of engineering, and is currently comprised of only 192 of the Society’s 144,000 members worldwide. Frangopol will be formally inducted, in honor of his contributions to civil engineering, at the Celebration of Leaders luncheon during ASCE’s 140th Annual Civil Engineering Conference in Las Vegas, Nev., which will be held from October 21 to 23, 2010.
ASCE is recognizing Frangopol for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of civil engineering, including bridge safety and maintenance, systems reliability and redundancy, and the integration of lifetime monitoring-maintenance-management with life-cycle cost through multi-criteria optimization under uncertainty.
Frangopol’s definition of redundancy of structural systems has helped develop system redundancy factors introduced in the first edition of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ “Load and Resistance Factor Design” Bridge Design Specifications. His other significant contributions include a probabilistic model for maintenance of deteriorated structures, a method for managing infrastructure systems that integrates lifetime safety and life-cycle cost, a multi-criteria optimization approach of individual structural systems and networks that simultaneously considers safety, serviceability, maintenance and life-cycle cost, and a method for probabilistic system performance assessment of long span structures. He has also demonstrated worldwide leadership in bridge engineering and life-cycle civil engineering, and he is the founding editor of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, an international peer-reviewed journal. Additionally, he is also the author or co-author of more than 250 books, book chapters and articles in refereed journals
Prior to joining Lehigh University in 2006, Frangopol was a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he had taught since 1983. He worked in academia at the Technical University of Civil Engineering in Bucharest, Romania, and in structural design with A. Lipski Consulting Engineers in Brussels, Belgium before joining the University of Colorado. Frangopol’s main areas of expertise are probabilistic methods and structural reliability, structural health monitoring, lifetime probabilistic optimization of structures and infrastructures, bridge engineering, and life-cycle analysis, design, maintenance, and management of structures and infrastructures.
An active member of ASCE, Frangopol has chaired the Executive and Awards committees of the Structural Engineering Institute, as well as the technical committees on Safety of Buildings, Safety of Bridges and Optimal Structural Design, the Technical Administrative Committee on Structural Safety and Reliability, and is the founder and current chair of the Technical Council on Life-Cycle Performance, Safety, Reliability and Risk of Structural Systems.
Frangopol received his doctorate in applied sciences from the University of Liège, Belgium, and holds two honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Civil Engineering in Bucharest and the University of Liège. He also recently received an honorary professorship of Tongji University in Shanghai, China, and is a Visiting Chair Professor at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in Taipei. He currently resides in Center Valley, Penn.
Founded in 1852, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) represents more than 144,000 civil engineers worldwide and is America’s oldest national engineering society. For more information, visit www.asce.org.
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