Page 6 - CEGE Spring 2023

MARGARET FAIRHURST, wife of Professor Emeritus CHARLES FAIRHURST, passed away peacefully Christmas morning 2022. Charles and Margaret’s marriage was a solid union, and their love was an example to all. They had seven children. Charles took leave twice from the University of Minne- sota to take the family to live in England for a year, and once for six months in France. Charles’ work offered them many opportunities to travel, something Margaret relished and lived to the full each time. A funeral was held January 5, 2023.
BOJAN GUZINA is co-organizer of the Advanced CISM School on Wave Motion in Heterogeneous Media, to be held at the Inter- national Centre for Mechanical Sciences
(CISM), in Udine, Italy, June 19-23, 2023. His co-coordinator is Bruno Lombard
from the Laboratoire de Mécanique et d’Acoustique in Marseille, France. The program features six invited lecturers from France, Switzerland, USA, and
the UK. Being asked to host this Advanced School is a notable distinction for researchers working in the area of mechanics.
JIA-LIANG LE received the IASSAR Early Achievement Research Award from the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability. The ICOSSAR 2021-2022 Conference Awards Cere- mony was held online in September 2022. This prize is awarded only once every four years to a researcher under the age of 45 for outstanding contribu- tions and accomplishments in the field
of structural safety and reliability. The recognition represents an important mile- stone in Le’s career. The IASSAR Early Achievement Research Award is one of the highest honors one can receive in the field of risk and reliability.
AWARDS. The Minnesota Department
of Transportation Research Steering Committee and the Minnesota Local Road Research Board announced their funding for academic transportation research. Six projects proposed by
four professors from CEGE have been selected for funding. Most projects are anticipated to begin July 2023 or sooner.
• JOHN GULLIVER “Wet Pond Modeling for Contaminant Retention and Maintenance,” sponsored by LLRB
• MIHAI MARASTEANU “Using Electric Vehicle Onboard Data for Pavement Quality Assessment and Manage- ment,” sponsored by MnDOT,
and “Sawing and Sealing Joints in Bituminous Pavements to Control Cracking,” sponsored by LRRB
• JIALIANG LE “Investigation on Mix Design of Recycled Asphalt Pave- ment (RAP) Materials,” sponsored by LRRB
6 CEGE | CSE.UMN.EDU/CEGE
CEGENEWS CONT ...
KETSON R. M. DOS SANTOS joins Structural Faculty. The newest addition to the CEGE structural faculty is Ketson Roberto Maximiano dos Santos. dos Santos comes most recently from his position as a Scientist in the Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics (EESD) Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Shields Uncertainty Research Group (SURG) at Johns Hopkins University.
dos Santos earned a Master’s in Civil Engineering (Structural Engineering, 2014) from the University of São Paulo, São Carlos, Brazil. He then went to Columbia University where he completed a Master’s of Philosophy (2018) and a Doctoral degree (2019) in Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. He focused his studies on structural reliability and, more specifically, on structural stochastic dynamics and random vibrations. His doctoral dissertation, titled “Stochastic dynamics and wavelets techniques for system response analysis and diagnostics: Diverse applications in structural and biomedical engineering,” was completed under the supervision of Ioannis A. Kougioumtzoglou. He
is eager to continue his research at CEGE in the areas of stochastic engineering dynamics and mechanics, uncertainty quantification for complex systems, structural reliability, risk based optimization, and signal processing for stochastic systems.
Since January, dos Santos has been teaching Matrix Structural Analysis. Students have the opportunity to understand how to use matrix methods in the analysis of linear structures and how these methods are implemented in computers. He also plans to teach courses related to probabilistic methods for engineering dynamics and mechanics and structural reliability.
dos Santos expressed his hope and eagerness about this new chapter, “I am happy to join the structural group at the University of Minnesota because of its commitment to the development of the next generation of engineers based on solid scientific knowledge. CEGE is the right place for me to develop my research in uncertainty quantification and engineering dynamics/mechanics because of its history of pioneering in the development of analytical, computational, and experimental methods, and because of its vision of inspired and innovative engineering for society.”