Keynote Speakers

Ian Buckle

Dr Buckle joined the Department of Civil and Environmental engineering at UNR in 1999 and became a Foundation Professor in 2009. He is the former Director of the UNR Center for Civil Engineering Earthquake Research. Before coming to Reno he served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and as Deputy Director of the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, University at Buffalo, New York (now the Multidisciplinary Center for Extreme Events Research). He earned his B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Auckland. Dr. Buckle’s research interests include seismic performance of highway bridges; design and retrofit criteria for bridges; earthquake protective systems for structures including the theory, hardware, and engineering applications of seismic isolation; tsunami loads on bridges; and soil-structure-interaction for structures with deep foundations such as long-span bridges. He has conducted short courses in bridge engineering, seismic retrofitting, and the seismic isolation of highway bridges. Dr Buckle received the 2016 Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers in recognition of his many contributions to improving the seismic performance of bridges.

Shyh-Jiann Hwang

Dr. Hwang is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. He also serves as the Director of National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) in Taiwan.  He received his Master and PhD form the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Hwang has been awarded the Distinguished Chair Professor of National Taiwan University. He serves as a member of seismic code committee in Taiwan and is very active in Taiwan concrete society. His research interests include shear behavior of reinforced concrete members, and seismic design and retrofitting of reinforced concrete structures. He had been responsible for providing technical supports to a national project that evaluates and retrofits all the non-code compliant school buildings in Taiwan. He is now in charge of the seismic retrofitting project by phases issued by the Ministry of Interior Affairs. This project is aimed to remove the seismic deficiency of the soft first story as a first priority for the residential buildings.

Dimitrios Lignos - WITHDRAWN

Professor Lignos joined the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland in 2016 from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, where he was a tenured Associate Professor and a William Dawson Scholar for Infrastructure Resilience. He holds a diploma (National Technical University of Athens, NTUA, 2003), M.S. (Stanford University, 2004) and Ph.D. (Stanford University, 2008). He was a post-doctoral scientist at Stanford University (2009) and in Kyoto University (2010). His research involves integrated computational modeling and large-scale experimentation for the fundamental understanding and simulating structural collapse of steel and composite structures as well as the development of metrics and technologies that promote low seismic damage over a structure’s lifecycle. His awards, among others, include the 2019 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Price from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the 2013 ASCE State-of-the-Art in Civil Engineering Award and the 2014 Christophe Pierre Award for Research Excellence - Early Career. 

Ying Zhou - WITHDRAWN

Ying Zhou is Professor and Chair in the Department of Disaster Mitigation for Structures, Tongji University, China and serves as the Vice Director of International Joint Research Laboratory of Earthquake Engineering (ILEE). The focus of her research is in the area of structural and earthquake engineering, particularly on understanding and improving the seismic performance of tall buildings under seismic loads. Recent research has examined the seismic response of earthquake-resilient systems and vertical vibration control of over-track tall buildings. Zhou has been a field editor for the Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering and editor of Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering.

Invited Speakers