Wei Song, Ph.D., F.ASCE, professor in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Song has served on the UA faculty since 2012. His scholarship advances disaster-resilient civil infrastructure through developing cyber-physical structural systems, experimental platforms, and data-driven condition assessment. His contributions include extending RTHS from earthquake engineering to multihazard applications such as wind, aerospace, and ocean engineering. In parallel, he and his students developed robust computer-vision and deep-learning methods for infrastructure damage detection and crack segmentation, including approaches that fuse 2D intensity imagery with 3D range data to improve accuracy and efficiency in infrastructure assessments.
Song’s research has been supported by competitive funding from federal agencies such as National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Aeronautics & Space Administration, as well as by state agencies and private industry. Song has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and is an inventor on two U.S. patents related to deep learning-based roadway crack segmentation and heterogeneous image fusion.
Within ASCE and the broader civil engineering community, Song has held significant leadership and editorial roles, including chair of the ASCE SEI Technical Committee on Structural Control and Sensing (2021-24) and service on multiple ASCE standards and technical-related committees. He also serves as vice chair of the NHERI User Forum, supporting the national natural hazards research community. His journal service includes editorship and editorial board membership of multiple leading journals spanning structural dynamics and structural engineering, such as Nonlinear Dynamics and Engineering Structures.
As an educator and mentor, Song has supervised and is supervising multiple Ph.D. students and M.S. graduates; his advisees’ recognitions include the ASCE O.H. Ammann Research Fellowship in Structural Engineering (2021).
Song earned his bachelor’s (2001) and master’s (2004) degrees in structural engineering from Tongji University, China, a master’s in systems science and mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis (2008), and his doctorate in civil engineering from Purdue University (2011).
