The Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering Department at the Missouri University of Science and Technology is pleased to welcome three new faculty members in the coming fall 2008 semester. Dr. Oh-Sung Kwon, Dr. Lesley Sneed, and Dr. Jeffrey Volz are all joining the faculty this August. The addition of these new faculty will broaden the on-going innovative structures, materials, and architectural engineering research at Missouri S&T. Each faculty member brings his/her own expertise in a variety of areas, including soil-structure interaction, information technology in structural research, structural behavior and design, buildings under blast loads, and analysis and evaluation of structural materials.

Dr. Oh-Sung Kwon received his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Drawn to civil engineering by the desire to contribute to society, his research covers all aspects of structural engineering with focus on seismic fragility evaluation of bridges, soil-structure interaction, and geographically distribute pseudo-dynamic simulations.

To minimize losses from earthquakes and to prioritize retrofit and repair of bridges before and after earthquakes, it is essential to identify which bridges are most important in a transportation network and which bridges are most vulnerable under large earthquake events. Dr. Kwon has been developing seismic fragility curves for typical bridges in mid-America through nonlinear analyses of sophisticated bridge models. These curves provide key information relating ground motion intensity to likely bridge damage levels, information that is highly sought after by decision makers in DOTs, emergency management organizations, and engineers.

Soil and foundation systems are typically represented by simplified elements, such as lumped masses and springs, However, the effects of soil and foundation systems are much more complicated than what can be represented by lump springs. Hence, in a bridge performance evaluation, the representation of soil and foundation systems with realistic analytical models is very important. Dr. Kwon has developed a method to analyze soil-structure interaction systems by combining the most suitable models for soils and foundations, and for bridge structures, that is significantly more robust and comprehensive than other currently available models.

To understand global behavior of a bridge under extreme natural hazards, it is essential to evaluate bridge performance as a whole, and not just only as a collection of components. However, due to the large extent and scale of bridge structures in a transportation network, a whole bridge can hardly be tested in any structural lab in the world. Dr. Kwon had developed a coordinated simulation framework which can distribute bridge components to geographically separate testing labs and analysis centers. By utilizing this approach,, DOTs can test and evaluate large scale transportation structures by maximizing the use of available research labs and analysis capabilities across the U.S. and beyond.

Dr. Lesley Sneed comes to Missouri S&T from Purdue University, where she earned her PhD in 2007. Dr. Sneed spent six years in the professional field as both a  project engineer an a staff engineer. While at Purdue, Dr. Sneed received the Portland Cement Association (PCA) Education Foundation Fellowship for a research project titled "Effect of Member Depth on the Shear Strength of Reinforced Concrete Flexural Members." Dr. Sneed's research interests are in the areas of constitutive modeling, and the behavior and design of concrete structures with a focus on testing of full-scale structural components such as those found in highway bridges.

In order to accurately predict the response of bridges to a given set of applied loads, it is important to have an accurate model of the relationship between applied loads and the response of materials from which the bridge is constructed. Dr. Sneed's research is directed towards providing increased knowledge of structural behavior as well as simplifying structural designs and provisions for structural design specifications. These simplifications and revisions are based on experimental evidence, and will ultimately serve to improve the efficiency, constructability, ad durability of bridges and building structures.

Dr. Sneed has studied the behavior and shear strength of large-scale reinforced concrete beams, as well as the repair and strengthening of structural concrete members using externally-bonded carbon reinforced polymer plates. She has also participated in the development of procedures for post-disaster structural evaluation for the state of Indiana. Dr. Sneed's research expertise and activities will address many of the needs that are facing our nation's highway bridges and associated infrastructure, including material characterization, improved design methods, retrofit and rehabilitation/repair programs, preventative and structural hazard mitigation, and construction specifications.

Before receiving his PhD from The Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Jeffrey Volz worked as a structural engineer in Chicago for 16 years, with Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill, CTL, Inc., Montgomery Watson Hazra and, most recently Holabird & Root, the oldest architecture firm in Chicago. During his professional career, Dr. Volz discovered that he enjoyed mentoring younger engineers. While at CTL, he did a fair amount of research, which he also found enjoyable. He commented that an academic position was a way to "bring those two things together in one job."

Dr. Volz' primary research interests are in the area of building structural systems, ranging from cladding systems to building framing systems, and include both experimental and analytical investigations. For cladding systems, Dr. Volz has investigated the performance of glass, precast, masonry, aluminum, GFRC, and EIFS. Dr. Volz is particularly interested in the performance of these cladding systems under extreme loading conditions, primarily high wind loads from hurricanes, accelerations during earthquake events, and thermal stresses from exposure to varying climates.

For building framing systems, Dr. Volz is interested in progressive collapse and reliability. In particular, Dr. Volz wants to apply evolutionary algorithms to predict critical elements in progressive collapse of multistory buildings. Evolutionary algorithms may also play a role in reliability analyses of multistory structures by examining overall reliability in extreme loading situations, such as hurricanes, earthquake events, and blast loadings.

Dr. Volz has extensive experience and interest in the application of new and existing materials in structural engineering. He sees research potential in looking at both improving existing materials and investigating new materials for use in buildings and other types of structures. His research experience has examined new materials for improving corrosion resistance of reinforced and prestressed concrete as well as the use of long carbon fibers for blast resistance.

The 2008 fall semester will begin in less than a month. The campus will be filled with many new faces: among these new faces will be the new faculty in the Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Department. We look forward to an exciting academic year and extend our warmest welcome to Dr. Oh-Sung Kwon, Dr. Lesley Sneed, and Dr. Jeffrey Volz.