Frangopol to receive coveted ASCE Award

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Dan M. Frangopol

Dan M. Frangopol, the Fazlur Rahman Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture, has been chosen to receive a top award from the nation’s oldest national engineering society.
Frangopol, who joined the Lehigh faculty in 2006, will receive the 2007 Ernest E. Howard Award in May from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The Howard Award is one of the organization’s Technical Distinguished Achievement Awards.
The annual award, named for the late former president of ASCE, commends Frangopol for “outstanding contributions to the advancement of structural engineering, particularly in the risk assessment and maintenance planning of deteriorating civil infrastructures.”
The award also cites Frangopol’s “notable recommendations for implementation of research results in design practice.”
The ASCE awards committee, in a letter to Frangopol, said it had “particularly noted your internationally recognized research achievements and fundamental contributions to the advancement of structural engineering.”
The award will be presented to Frangopol during the ASCE Structures Congress in May in Long Beach, Calif. ASCE has an international membership of more than 140,000 civil engineers.
Frangopol is the latest in a series of Lehigh engineers to receive the Howard Award:
• George Tamaro ’61 M.S., a partner with Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers, received the award in 2006.
• Theodore Galambos ’59 Ph.D., professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of Minnesota, won in 1992.
• John Fisher, professor emeritus of civil engineering at Lehigh and former director of the ATLSS (Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems) Center at Lehigh, won in 1979.
• Bruce G. Johnston ’34 M.S., the late professor of civil engineering at Lehigh, received the award in 1974.
• Lynn Beedle, late professor emeritus of civil engineering at Lehigh, shared the award in 1963.
Frangopol, who came to Lehigh from the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the founding president of the International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety and also of the International Association for Life Cycle Civil Engineering.
Frangopol is also the founding editor of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering. His past awards include the T.Y. Lin Medal (2006), ASCE’s Nathan M. Newmark Medal (2005) and the JSPS Fellowship Award for Research in Japan (2002).
Frangopol holds a doctorate in applied sciences from the University of Liege in Belgium.
--Kurt Pfitzer