Nagarajaiah and team win top civil engineering honor

Satish Nagarajaiah

Satish Nagarajaiah, a Rice professor of civil engineering and of mechanical engineering, and his team have been honored with the prestigious Leon S. Moisseiff Award for 2015 by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

The award recognizes an important paper, published by the society, that deals with the broad field of structural design. Nagarajaiah and his lab paper described a new adaptive negative-stiffness structural system in a paper published in the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering in 2014. The award committee noted the paper’s findings “provide a seminal advance in influencing accepted design paradigms.” Nagarajaiah and his team were awarded a patent for their invention.

The research resulted from a study funded by a $1.6-million, five-year National Science Foundation grant awarded in 2008, “Development of Next Generation Adaptive Seismic Protection Systems,” for which Nagarajaiah served as the principal investigator.

Dharma Theja Pasala, who earned his Ph.D. from Rice in civil engineering in 2013, also contributed to the research. Nagarajaiah earned his Ph.D. in structural engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1990. He joined the Rice faculty in 1999.

Nagarajaiah and his team will formally receive the award at the ASCE’s annual Structures Congress in Portland, Ore., April 23-25. The award includes a bronze medal and a cash prize. It was established in 1947 and named after Leon S. Moisseiff, an American suspension bridge engineer.