Nagarajaiah elected ASCE Fellow

By Patrick Kurp
Special to Rice News

Satish Nagarajaiah, a professor of civil engineering and of mechanical engineering at Rice University, has been elected a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

The citation reads, in part: “For sustained leadership and pioneering contributions to nonlinear structural dynamics of base isolated structures, adaptive stiffness structural systems, smart tuned mass dampers and nanomaterial-based strain sensing, and development of novel sparse structural system identification techniques that have been applied in full-scale buildings and bridges.”

Satish Nagarajaiah

Only 3 percent of ASCE members are elected fellows. Nagarajaiah was awarded the Moisseiff Award by ASCE in 2015 for developing new adaptive stiffness structures and the ASCE Raymond Reese Research Prize in 2017 for developing a novel method for cable tension assessment using sparse identification.

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. He joined the Rice faculty in 1999, and received an NSF CAREER Award that year for adaptive stiffness structures.

Nagarajaiah’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research and industry. He has published more than 140 journal papers and more than 150 conference papers and holds four U.S. patents. He supervises two postdocs and four Ph.D. students.

Nagarajaiah is the managing editor of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering and edits two other journals: Wiley’s international journal Structural Control and Health Monitoring and Techno-Press’ Structural Monitoring and Maintenance. In 2012, he was named an inaugural fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute. He serves on the ASCE’ Structural Engineering Institute’s board of governors.

The ASCE, headquartered in Reston, Va., is the oldest national engineering society in the United States, with more than 150,000 members in 177 countries.

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