Anil K. Agrawal, Ph.D., P.E., F.SEI, Dist.M.ASCE, currently a Herbert G. Keyser professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York, has been honored with inclusion by ASCE in its 2023 class of distinguished members for significant and definitive contributions in extreme hazards and mitigation for bridges and service to the Society as editor of ASCE’s Journal of Bridge Engineering.
Agrawal was editor-in-chief of Bridge Engineering from 2009 to 2021. He was chair of ASCE’s SEI Committee on Bridge Inspection, Rehabilitation, and Monitoring as well as the SEI Committee on Structural Control and Sensing. He has also been the chair of the Engineering Mechanics Committee of the ASCE Metropolitan Section since 2013.
He is recognized by his peers worldwide as a pioneering researcher in bridge structures. His interests there include deterioration of bridge elements, robotic inspection of components, posthazard assessment via drones, behavior during extreme events like earthquakes, and vehicular impacts, among others. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including CUNY’s Performance Excellence Award in 2000 and ASCE’s 2019 Arthur M. Wellington Prize for the paper “Heavy Truck Collision with Bridge Piers: Computational Simulation Study,” as well as the Society’s Ernest E. Howard Award last year.
Academically, aside from other recognitions attesting to his stellar character and teaching excellence, the models Agrawal developed have resulted in over 100 dissertations. His work on impact on bridges by overheight vehicles is being followed by researchers around the world. In 2022 he was awarded a patent on his Laser Ranging Over-Height Vehicle Detector System (LRA-OHVD) by the U.S. Patent Office. During the past 24 years he has received some $15 million in research funding.
Agrawal’s success as chief editor contributed to a large increase in article submissions while the acceptance range hovered at 0.25 to 0.35. Google Scholar metrics in 2017 ranked the Journal of Bridge Engineering 18th among structural engineering journals. This success garnered him 2019’s Richard R. Torrens Award for outstanding performance.
He chaired numerous sessions during ASCE conferences, and served as chair of the Workshop on Safety and Behavior of Bridges Subjected to Blast in a Multihazard Environment, New York City 2009, sponsored by FHWA. Notable along with other major conferences he has chaired are the NSF-supported Road Infrastructure Reimagined, in Washington, D.C. (2019), and VIRTUAL Workshop on Redundancy in Bridges for Risk Mitigation in a Multihazard Environment.
Agrawal earned his doctoral degree in civil engineering in 1997 from the University of California, Irvine, his M.Eng. from the University of Tokyo, and his B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
