News

TRG alumnus Dr. Arun Prakash gets tenured at Purdue

 Purdue University announced today that Dr. Arun Prakash is given tenure and promoted to Associate Professor. Arun was a member of our group as a post-doctoral research associate from 2007 to 2009. Congratulations to Arun! [posted April 21, 2017]

 

 

UCLA – MSOL | Master of Science in Engineering Online is ranked #1 (again)

 UCLA's MSOL program was tied for first place among the nation's "Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs" by the US News & World Report. Dr. Taciroglu teaches two courses for MSOL under the "Mechanics of Structures" program. For more, see www.msol.ucla.edu, and the US News & World Report website. [posted February 9, 2017]

 

 

Farid receives an Honorable Mention for Postdoctoral Research

 Dr. Farid Ghahari is among the recipients of an Honorable Mention for 2017 UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research. The recognition comes with a $1000 award. Congratulations to Farid! [posted January 5, 2017]

 

 

UCLA Civil Engineering ranked #10 in the US

UCLA Civil & Environmental Engineering Department is ranked as #10 in the United States by QS World University Rankings. With the exception of Stanford and UCLA, all in top 10 have large faculty rosters. Congrats to CEE [posted September 6, 2016]

 

 

Elnaz Defends!

Elnaz Esmaeilzadeh successfully defended her PhD dissertation on August 24, 2016. Congrats to her! Now she can trace her academic forebears all the way back to Lagrange, Fourier, and Euler at the Mathematics Genealogy Project website 🙂 

Elnaz will soon start as a post-doctoral researcher at Caltech under the supervision of Dr. Asimaki. [posted September 1, 2016]

 

 

Atwood Building in Anchorage, Alaska

A 7.1 magnitude earthquake rattled south-central Alaska on January 24, 2016. Our group member Dr. Farid Ghahari used the acceleration data recorded at the Atwood Building in Anchorage and created a video (below) of the movements experienced by this structure. This video was ultimately published by USGS.

The video also found some news-coverage at the local media outlets (see, for example, the Alaska Dispatch News Article and the KTVA Article [posted by Ertugrul Taciroglu, April 6, 2016].

 
 

Scholarships awarded

Group members Barbaros Cetiner and Wenyang Zhang were awarded fellowships.  Barbaros and Wenyang were respectively awarded the Martin Rubin and the T.H. Lin Scholarships. Congrats to both of them! See the department news post about their achievements here [posted December 1, 2015]. 

My bleeding heart

Our group's work on Watts Towers was featured in the following UCLA video. 

"Why are the Watts Towers crumbling and what can be done to stop it? Engineers from UCLA are bringing their expertise and precision instrumentation to this cultural landmark in collaboration with conservation scientists from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As the towers flex, sway and vibrate the data collected will help investigators develop new methods of preserving Simon Rodia's masterpiece" [posted September 3, 2013].