] James L. Beck, Ph.D., F.EMI, Dist.M.ASCE, the George W. Housner Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology, has been honored with inclusion by ASCE in its 2022 class of Distinguished Members for his fundamental contributions to analytical and computational earthquake engineering that have made possible the safe design and reliable assessment of structures, and for developing novel Bayesian methods in civil engineering.
Beck is known as the scholar among scholars who have a profound knowledge and authority in Bayesian methods of analysis. His first publication on probabilistic system identification can be dated prior to 1990, before the majority of the civil engineering community recognized the importance of such a probabilistic approach.
He is also a highly respected researcher in the engineering mechanics and structural health monitoring communities. He has made seminal contributions particularly in the area of structural health monitoring, where he introduced unique solutions to the very difficult problem of damage detection and localization using system identification methods. The work that followed those initial contributions has been consistently at the forefront of technical and engineering developments.
The Subset Simulation method well illustrates the main features of Beck’s research: interdisciplinarity, rigor, and high impact. This noteworthy achievement is an advanced stochastic simulation method for estimating small failure probabilities of complex structural systems, such as bridges and tall buildings. Originally developed for structural applications, the method is used in many other fields, including aerospace engineering, complex infrastructure networks, computational statistics, and even quantitative finance.
Beck, in addition, has an outstanding record of educating the next generation of engineering researchers. Attesting to this is his appointment by Caltech (faculty member since 1981) as the Housner chaired professor. He served as president of the California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering, and his several ASCE awards include the coveted George W. Housner Medal for Structural Control and Monitoring.
Beck has over 390 technical publications on topics in earthquake engineering, structural dynamics, system identification, structural health monitoring, structural control, design optimization, seismic risk and loss estimation, etc. He was awarded the Senior Research Prize in Computational Stochastic Mechanics in Rome in June 2005 by the International Association of Structural Safety and Reliability, among other honors.
He has served as an associate editor of ASCE’s Journal of Engineering Mechanics and organized a special issue in January 2004 that reported studies of the IASC-ASCE Structural Health Monitoring Benchmarks. From 2007 to 2011 Beck served on the Board of Governors of the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute.
ASCE will honor the 2022 class of Distinguished Members during the ASCE 2022 Convention, Oct. 24, in Anaheim, California.
