Nagarajaiah named inaugural fellow of SEI

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to Rice News

SATISH NAGARAJAIAH

Satish Nagarajaiah, professor of civil and environmental engineering and of mechanical engineering and materials science, has been named an inaugural fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) of the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE).

The SEI board created the new honor “to recognize a select group of distinguished SEI members as leaders and mentors in the structural engineering profession.”

Nagarajaiah’s research interests include structural dynamic systems, seismic protection, earthquake engineering, smart structures, structural health monitoring, and sensing and monitoring of structures subjected to earthquake, wind and waves.

Nagarajaiah, who joined the Rice University faculty in 1999, was named managing editor of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering in November 2011. He was also appointed editor of Structural Control and Health Monitoring in January 2009.

A native of India, Nagarajaiah received a bachelor’s degree in structural engineering from Bangalore University in 1980 and a master’s degree in the same discipline in 1982 from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He earned his Ph.D. in structural engineering from the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1990.

His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and industry. He has published more than 70 journal papers and more than 120 conference papers, currently supervises six Ph.D. students and holds two U.S. patents. He has been awarded the NSF CAREER award in 1998 for his research on smart structures with variable stiffness.

Nagarajaiah and the other inaugural class of SEI fellows will be recognized March 31 at the SEI Structures Congress in Chicago.

— Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.