Source: University of Notre Dame

 

Earlier this summer, during the 2017 conference of the Engineering Mechanics Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers in San Diego, Ahsan Kareem received the ASCE’s Masanobu Shinozuka Medal. Kareem, the Robert Moran Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences at Notre Dame, was recognized for “his contributions to the modeling of stochastic wind, waves, and earthquake loads and their effects on buildings, bridges, and offshore structures.” 

An active member of the NHERI Community, he is co-PI on the SimCenter and a senior researcher on the DesignSafe Cyberinfrastructure team. In June, as part of the SimCenter series Natural Hazard Engineering 101, Professor Kareem presented a talk titled, "Computational Fluid Dynamics, Simulation, and Computational Tools."

Kareem’s work has made profound impacts in the area of stochastic dynamics and simulation with particular applications to nonlinear analysis and modeling of offshore systems using very efficient time and frequency domain schemes under the combined action of wind, waves, and current. In bridge aerodynamics, he has offered a unified nonlinear aerodynamic/Aeroelastic model that goes beyond the customary linear approach proposed by previous researchers. He has made similar fundamental contributions leading to the analysis, design, and performance assessment of tall buildings using computational, laboratory and fullscale experiments. This includes performance of building cladding and glass in hurricanes. Kareem has been actively involved in the performance based design of structures under winds and in the development of codes and standards.

In the arena of thunderstorm winds, he has advanced a new metric called the Gust Front Factor to account for the changes in kinematics and dynamics of the wind field. Over the last decade, he has developed a virtual organization tool called VORTEX-Winds that provides a host of computational and experimental resources and databases on a cyberinfrastructure-based platform. Some of these resources are being enhanced and included in the Discovery Portal of the NHERI’s DesignSafe. 

The Masanobu Shinozuka Medal was instituted in 2013, to honor Masanobu Shinozuka, a pioneer in stochastic systems study and its applications to civil engineering, primarily through mechanical and aerospace engineering.