It has been a while since my last blog post, and I wanted to write about the amazing REU stuff which happened this summer. I was blessed to be able to work with five exceptional undergraduate students from different universities in the US [I was going to call them young talents, but then I’m not that old to call others young] and faculty members of Virginia Tech as part of “the resilient and sustainable buildings” initiative.  In a course of 8-week period, we worked on two main thrusts of performance-based assessment seismic assessment data collection and sustainability evaluation for mid-rise … Continue reading Summer REU recap or How we nailed it!

What Murrah building has in common with a galaxy note 7? One can say they both failed to perform as expected . The same person can also point out they both need engineers to figure out what went wrong. On February 28th, SEI graduate chapter of Virginia tech invited Dr. Osteraas, group vice president of Exponent Inc., and Andrew Hardyniec (VT Alumni working at Exponent) to talk about structural failure and how Exponent helps to “unravel the mystery”. The presentations were quite amusing and fun to listen to. Two interesting takeaways: Murray progressive collapse was due to the extra upward … Continue reading Exponent Info Session: From Murrah building to Galaxy note 7

“Resilient and sustainable building (RSB)” is a collaborative NSF-funded research project at VT to develop a comprehensive framework for the early design of mid-rise office buildings. The main goal of this project is to optimize office buildings performance in terms of economic constraints and environmental impacts. This summer, RSB is offering 4 paid undergraduate research positions to help with two ongoing thrusts of the project: structural analysis under natural hazards and environmental life cycle assessment. The anticipated duration of REU is 8 weeks and the interested applicants should be US citizen or permanent residents and enrolled in a US undergraduate … Continue reading REU opportunity at VT

Here is my take on what happened in SimCenter Bootcamp: Day 1: Peter (who is Peter?) showed how to use Unix, virtual machine, and Github to access files of the workshop and work with our own codes. In the afternoon, Frank (Okay, who is this one now?) gave us a short introduction to C programming. Day 2: Frank demonstrated some codes for parallelization of C codes using OpenMP and MPI.  Day 3: More on C programming; abstraction, clauses and a bit of structure and object-oriented programing in C++ Day 4: Peter showed us how to make a clean app interface … Continue reading A summary of SimCenter Workshop

The SimCenter Bootcamp on natural hazard modeling is being held on July 30-August 3  in UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station  (workshop information). So, here I’m at Berkeley, in this little beautiful house with a creek view waiting for tomorrow: And here is the creek, shadowed by bushes and trees: Stay tuned for more on the workshop, San Fransisco, and natural hazard modeling! Continue reading The SimCenter Workshop

After a long procrastination, I managed to make this happen! Please stay tuned for updates on my research, conferences and activities that are happening at VT! Continue reading The site is up now!