Dan Frangopol named honorary professor by two Chinese universities

Dan Frangopol, a structural engineer noted for his contributions to life-cycle engineering, has been named an honorary professor by two of China’s top engineering universities: the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) and Chang’an University in Xian.
The honors were two of many international honors that have been bestowed recently on Frangopol, who is the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh.
Frangopol is the third structural engineer to be named an honorary professor by HIT, which is located in northeast China and is consistently ranked among the nation’s best science and engineering universities.
He is the first structural engineer to receive the honor from Chang’an, located in central China, which ranks among the nation’s best universities for highway and bridge engineering and is China’s only school with a College of Highways.
Frangopol is the first holder of Lehigh’s Khan Chair. Fazlur Rahman Khan completed the engineering designs for many landmark structures, including the John Hancock Center and Sears Tower in Chicago. Shortly before his death in 1982, Khan was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Lehigh.

In 2012, Frangopol received the inaugural Fazlur Rahman Khan Life-Cycle Civil Engineering Medal at the Third International Symposium of Life-Cycle Civil Engineering in Vienna. Earlier this year, he received Lehigh’s Eleanor and Joseph F. Libsch Research Award, which recognizes the quality, quantity and impact of scholarship and/or artistic achievement.


Later this month, Frangopol will deliver keynote lectures at two international conferences—the Sixth International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructures (SHMII-6) to be held Dec. 9-11 in Hong Kong, and the Asia-Pacific Conference on FRP in Structures (APFIS 2013) scheduled for Dec. 11-13 in Melbourne.
While in Melbourne, Frangopol will also give a lecture at Monash University.
The three invitations cap off an active year for Frangopol, who joined the Lehigh faculty in 2006.
In January, he gave a keynote lecture at the Workshop on Innovations in Civil Infrastructure Engineering at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in Taipei. In March, he delivered the plenary lecture at the 23rd Dresden Bridge Symposium (DBBS) in Dresden, Germany.
In June, Frangopol delivered the FCE Distinguished Lecture at the Research Institute for Sustainable Urban Development of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Faculty of Construction and Environment.
From Oct. 29-Nov. 1, in Gramado, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, he gave a keynote lecture at the Third Symposium on Subway, Railway and Highway Infrastructure of the Fifty Fifth Congress of the Brazilian Concrete Institute (IBRACON). One week later, in Brno, Czech Republic, he gave the plenary lecture at the Eleventh International Probabilistic Workshop (IPW11).
Frangopol was recently named honorary president of the Italian Group and the Brazilian Group of  the International Association of Bridge Maintenance and Safety (IABMAS). He was also named a member of the Society Awards Committee (SAC) of the 140,000-member American Society of Civil Engineers. In October, he was named an ASCE Presidential Appointee to the Engineering Mechanics Institute Board of Governors.
Next year, Frangopol has been invited to give keynote lectures in May in Shanghai to the International Conference on Sustainable Development of Critical Infrastructure (IC-SDCI-2014) and in October in Sydney to the Ninth Austroads Bridge Conference (ABC 2014).
In June, Frangopol will travel to Romania, his native country, to receive an honorary doctorate degree from the Technical University of Iasi (TU-Iasi).
Frangopol holds honorary professorships from four other Chinese universities: the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Southeast University in Nanjing, Tianjin University and Tongji University in Shanghai.