Editor’s Note

In this final group of introductions, I begin with our managing editors, Sherif El-Tawil and Joseph Tedesco, who assist me directly in previewing submissions, reviewing appeals, assisting with following up on late reviews, and filling in for me when I am overwhelmed with my normal university duties and research activities.

Sherif El-Tawil (Fig. 1) is professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He graduated with honors from Cairo University in 1989 with a B.S. in civil engineering and received an M.S. in structural engineering in 1991, also from Cairo University. In 1996, he received a Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from Cornell University and subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Central Florida. He moved to the University of Michigan in 2002. He also served as visiting professor at the University of Rennes, France, in 2008. Prof. El-Tawil’s general research interest lies in computational modeling, analysis, and testing of structural materials and systems. He is especially interested in how buildings and bridges behave under the extreme loading conditions generated by manmade and natural hazards such as seismic excitation, collision by heavy objects, and blast. The focus of his research effort is to investigate how to utilize new materials, concepts and technologies to create innovative structural systems that mitigate the potentially catastrophic effects of extreme loading. Much of his research is directed toward the computational and theoretical aspects of structural engineering, with particular emphasis on computational simulation, constitutive modeling, multiscale techniques, macro-plasticity formulations, nonlinear solution strategies, and visualization methods. He has published over 120 technical papers, including 49 refereed journal papers in major publication venues. He is also lead author of a soon-to-be-released ASCE guide for seismic design of hybrid steel-concrete coupled wall systems. Within ASCE, Prof. El-Tawil is chair of the Technical Administrative Committee on Metals and is former chair of the committee on Composite Steel-Concrete Construction. He is also a member of the ASCE Blast, Methods of Analysis, and Seismic Effects committees. He has served as consultant to major companies and to agencies such as the Florida Department of Transportation, Louisiana Department of Transportation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Prof. El-Tawil’s teaching, service, and research efforts have been recognized through a number of important awards. Most notably, he is recipient of ASCE’s Huber Research Prize, Moisseiff Award, Wellington Prize, and Norman Medal.

Joseph Tedesco (Fig. 2) is currently Elizabeth D. Rockwell Dean of the Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston. He obtained his B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Notre Dame (1971), M.S. in civil engineering from Tufts University (1974), and Ph.D. in civil engineering from Lehigh University (1982). Professor Tedesco is a registered professional engineer in the states of Florida and Alabama and has over $35\text{years}$ of diversified experience ranging from practical structural design to highly mission-oriented research projects. He has been principal investigator on more than 30 federally funded research projects involving the dynamic response of structures and materials to high-intensity, short-duration impulse loadings, including blast and impact. He is a six-time U.S. Air Force research fellow, and has worked in residence at several AFRL’s, including Tyndall AFB and Eglin AFB. Dr. Tedesco has been involved in research involving highly nonlinear numerical simulations of structures and materials subject to blast and impact loading, experimental research to assess the dynamic response characteristics of a variety of construction materials, and explosive tests of full-scale building structures. He is also a member of the American Concrete Institute (ACI), and is a charter member of the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI). He is member of the ASCE Committee on Blast, Shock and Vibratory Effects and the ACI Committee on Short Duration Dynamics and Vibratory Load Effects. He is also the past chairman of the ASCE Technical Administrative Committee (TAC) on Dynamic Effects. In addition to his appointment as managing editor this Journal, Dr. Tedesco is associate editor of the International Journal of Computers and Structures. Dr. Tedesco’s teaching background includes courses on structural design, structural analysis, and structural dynamics. He has written more than 110 technical publications including 70 refereed articles, 4 books, 2 book chapters and 38 technical reports. He is the principal author of the internationally renowned textbook Structural Dynamics: Theory and Applications (Prentice Hall, 1999).

The final group of associate editors being introduced in this issue includes: Terje Haukaas, who oversees papers in the area of structural reliability; Amit Kanvinde, who handles papers for the technical committee on metals; Yahya Kurama, who is one among four associate editors assisting with the review of papers in concrete and masonry structures; Shalva Marjanishvili, who represents the technical committee on shock and vibratory effects; Maria Gabriella Mulas, one of our international members who assists with overload papers on reinforced concrete structures; and finally Ertugrul Taciroglu, who handles papers on analysis and computation.

Terje Haukaas (Fig. 3) is an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of California at Berkeley with support from a Fulbright Fellowship and a doctoral fellowship from the Research Council of Norway. His accomplishments include theoretical developments in response sensitivity analysis and reliability analysis. He has actively contributed to the advancement of finite-element-based reliability analysis and the development of reliability analysis software. Before heading to Berkeley Dr. Haukaas obtained the Sivilingenior degree in structural engineering from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He subsequently worked on projects ranging from design of reinforced concrete buildings to analysis of submerged floating tunnels. Prior to undertaking a career in engineering he practiced as a carpenter in Norway, obtaining formal degrees as journeyman and master builder. Dr. Haukaas’s teaching curriculum encompasses structural analysis, structural safety, and wood design. His research interests focus on probabilistic methods in civil engineering, with emphasis on performance-based engineering. He is particularly interested in the prediction of damage and impacts away from the building site, which are often neglected by current design codes. He is presently leading a strategic research project on infrastructure risk that addresses a broad range of hazards and their economic and environmental impacts. He is also spearheading the use of building information modeling in structural analysis and performance-based engineering. Dr. Haukaas is a registered professional engineer in the province of British Columbia, Canada. He is member of several scholarly committees, including the Joint Committee on Structural Safety (JCSS), the Probabilistic Methods Committee (PMC) of the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Division, the Advisory Council of the International Forum on Engineering Decision Making (IFED), and the Board of the International Civil Engineering Risk and Reliability Association (CERRA).

Amit Kanvinde (Fig. 4) is associate professor of structural engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, with his Bachelor’s degree. Subsequently he joined Stanford University for his graduate studies, where he was awarded the John A. Blume Fellowship. He obtained his M.S. in 2000 and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004, both in civil and environmental engineering. In the same year, he joined the University of California at Davis as an assistant professor. Since joining UC Davis, he has conducted research on a wide variety of topics relevant to steel structures. At the material scale, his research relies on computational modeling to investigate mechanisms of earthquake-induced ultralow cycle fatigue in steel. At the structural scale, his research includes large-scale testing to address the response of concentrically braced frames, column base connections, as well as fillet-welded connections. Dr. Kanvinde’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Steel Construction, and the California Department of Transportation. He is the recipient of the 2008 ASCE Norman Medal for his paper “Void Growth Model and Stress Modified Critical Strain Model to Predict Ductile Fracture in Structural Steels.”

Yahya C. Kurama (Fig. 5) is associate professor of civil engineering and director of graduate studies, Department of Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. He received his B.S. in civil engineering from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1990, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in civil engineering from Lehigh University in 1993 and 1997, respectively. His research interests include the behavior and design of precast/prestressed concrete, cast-in-place reinforced concrete, and steel-concrete hybrid wall and frame building structures under extreme hazards from earthquakes and fire. Dr. Kurama is a registered engineer in Indiana. He is a recipient of the University of Notre Dame Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2008, PCI Young Educator Achievement Award in 2005, corecipient of the ASCE T.Y. Lin Award in 2003, and corecipient of the PCI Martin P. Korn Award in 2002. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 1998. Dr. Kurama is a member of ACI Committees on Composite and Hybrid Structures, Performance-based Seismic Design of Concrete Buildings, and Precast Concrete Structures; ASCE Composite Construction Committee; and PCI Seismic and Student Education Committees.

Shalva Marjanishvili (Fig. 6) is a technical director at Hinman Consulting Engineers with offices in San Francisco and Alexandria, Va. He earned his B.S. and Ph.D. in structural engineering from the Georgian Technical University, and an M.S. in structural engineering from Stanford University. He has more than $20\text{years}$ of experience in structural engineering. Dr. Marjanishvili is responsible for Hinman Consulting Engineer’s analytical capabilities including progressive collapse analysis of new and existing buildings, antiterrorist design, and analysis of air-blast response of existing and new structures. He is a principal author of Hinman analysis software for evaluating structural response to explosive terrorist threats using new and innovative analysis techniques and cost-effective design solutions to provide and improve reliability and robustness of structural systems against various threats and hazards, natural or manmade. His experience includes protective antiterrorism design, progressive collapse mitigation, vulnerability and risk assessments of numerous federal office buildings including federal and state courthouses, embassy structures, airline terminals including airline control towers, military installations including command and control centers, and commercial buildings including banks, pharmaceutical, and petrochemical facilities. Dr. Shalva is the new Chair of ASCE/SEI Blast, Shock and Impact Committee, and a registered civil and structural engineer in California.

Maria Gabriella Mulas (Fig. 7) received a Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from University of Cagliari, Italy, in 1980, and an M.S. in reinforced concrete structures from Politecnico di Milano in Italy in 1981. In 1984 she continued her graduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, where she received an M.S. in civil engineering in 1985. Since 1983 she has been a part of the faculty of Politecnico di Milano. Most of her research activity focuses on earthquake engineering, with special attention to modeling in the nonlinear range of both reinforced concrete and steel-framed structures under earthquake loading and to the model implementation in ad hoc developed numerical codes. Recent studies, in cooperation with other researchers at Politecnico di Milano, deal with the seismic redesign of precast frames for industrial buildings through passive control and the numerical simulation of shaking table tests on shear walls. The latter research study has been conducted within two international projects coordinated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the French Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA), respectively. Additional studies, in cooperation with researchers at University of Brescia (Italy), have addressed a solution for bridge-vehicle dynamic interaction. Gabriella has been active in service mainly within her university but also within the engineering community. At Politecnico di Milano she has been a member of the Administration Board and of the Equal Opportunity Committee. Presently she is a member of the Integrated Academic Senate. She has been the coordinator of the Italian unit in the International Research Project coordinated by IAEA on “Safety Significance of Near Field Earthquakes” and is presently member of the International Advisory Committee of the Smart-2008 (Seismic Design and Best-Estimate Methods for Assessment of Reinforced Concrete Buildings subjected to Torsion and Nonlinear Effects) benchmark launched in 2007 by CEA and EDF (Electricitè de France).

Ertugrul Taciroglu (Fig. 8) received a B.S. degree from Istanbul Technical University in 1993, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1995 and 1998, respectively. Dr. Taciroglu specializes in computational solid and structural mechanics. Prior to joining UCLA in 2001, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets at UIUC, where he worked on developing robust finite elements, and arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian methods for simulating the mechanical response of a burning solid-propellant and its interaction with the fluid phase. His current research projects include parameter identification of nonlinear systems, soil-structure interaction in bridge-support structures, energy harvesting from ambient vibrations, structural response under extreme loading such as explosions and ballistic impact, and multiscale modeling of cellular materials. This research is primarily sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the California Department of Transportation, and the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center. Dr. Taciroglu was the recipient of a 2006 NSF-CAREER Award. In 2009, he was elected Professor of the Year by UCLA’s Student Chapter of ASCE.

The primary themes of papers selected for this final issue for 2009 are seismic effects and metal structures. One paper on masonry structures and another on structural identification complete the primary technical papers appearing this month. The issue concludes with a discussion and the authors’ closure on a paper dealing with long-term behavior of prestressed composite beams.