Professor Armen Der Kiureghian, Taisei Chair in Civil Engineering, was the honored speaker at CEE's Spring Distinguished Lecture on April 17, 2014.
Lecture
"Post-Hazard learning, risk assessment and decision-making for infrastructure systems." See abstract.
Bio
Armen Der Kiureghian received his BS and MS. in Civil Engineering from the University of Teheran, Iran, and his PhD in Structural Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975. After three years at the University of Southern California, he joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has served as Assistant Professor (1978-81), Associate Professor (1981-85), Professor (1985-), and Vice Chair for Instruction (2007-2009) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Since July 1999, he has held the Taisei Chair in Civil Engineering at UC Berkeley.
After the devastating Spitak earthquake of 1988 in Armenia, he was instrumental in founding the American University of Armenia in Yerevan as an affiliate of the University of California. He has served as the founding Dean of the College of Engineering (1991-2007), as the founding Director of the Engineering Research Center (1992-2004), and as Interim Provost (2011-2012) of AUA, all concurrently with his Berkeley position. He continues to serve is a founding member of the Board of Trustees of AUA.
Der Kiureghian's research deals with development and application of probabilistic methods to solve civil engineering problems, with special emphasis on problems arising from the effects of earthquakes on constructed facilities. Specific interests are in safety and reliability assessment of structures, risk analysis and decision making, stochastic structural dynamics, and systems modeling and performance assessment. He has more than 320 publications, including more than 110 in archival journals and book chapters.
Among other awards, Der Kiureghian is a recipient of the ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize (1988), the CERRA Award of the Civil Engineering Risk and Reliability Association (1999), the ASCE Alfred M. Freudenthal Medal (2006), the ASCE Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award (2006), the Distinguished Research Award of the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability (2013), and the ASCE George Winter Medal (2014). In 2001 he was awarded the Movses Khorenatsi Medal by the Government of the Republic of Armenia for his contributions in advancing higher education in Armenia. He has been honored as a Distinguished Alumnus of the Faculty of Engineering of Tehran University (2004) and of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2006). He is an elected foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia (1998) and an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering (2011).