Editor’s Note

Six more editorial board members are profiled in this issue: Finley Charney and Keith Hjelmstad, who serve as associate editors (AEs) in the area of analysis and computation; Venkatesh Kodur, who handles papers on special design issues, particularly fire and high temperature effects; Q. S. Li, one of our international AEs who assists with reviewing papers in wind and general dynamic effects; and Judy Liu and Andrea Surovek, both overseeing papers for the ASCE technical committee on metals.

Finley Charney (Fig. 1), PhD, P.E., F.ASCE, is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech (VT), located in Blacksburg, Virginia. He also serves as director of the Center for Extreme Load Effects on Structures (CELES), also at Virginia Tech. Prior to joining the VT faculty in 2001, Dr. Charney accumulated more than twenty years of experience as a practicing professional engineer. His research interests are related to the analysis, design, and behavior of structures subjected to wind and seismic effects. Specialties within this field include advanced structural analysis, assessment and modeling of damping in structures, passive energy systems, and the development of new structural systems. Dr. Charney teaches a variety of courses at Virginia Tech, including Structural Analysis, Matrix Structural Analysis, Nonlinear Structural Analysis, Structural Dynamics, Advanced Structural Dynamics, and Earthquake Engineering. He has also developed a variety of continuing education courses, including the ASCE courses Fundamentals of Earthquake Engineering, and A Guide to the ASCE 7-05 Seismic Load Provisions. Associated with his educational work, Dr. Charney has created two computer programs, NONLIN and EQ-Tools. He received his MS and BS degrees in civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and his PhD in engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.

Keith Hjelmstad (Fig. 2), university vice president and dean of the College of Technology and Innovation at Arizona State University (ASU), is the driving force behind one of the most creative and innovative transdisciplinary engineering programs in the country. As the dean of the core college on the polytechnic campus he orchestrates the applied science, engineering, technology, and management programs with those of other ASU units and ensures the academic curricula align with the needs of industry society. As university vice president, he serves on the ASU leadership team and he champions further academic development of programs, activities, and community relations for the polytechnic campus. His $25\text{years}$ of experience as a professor and associate dean of academic affairs and his involvement on the Science Steering Committee of the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign helped prepare him for his current position. As a professor at Illinois, he was recognized for his excellence in advising and education. As associate dean, he was instrumental in establishing several innovative programs. Hjelmstad’s research focuses on computational mechanics, earthquake engineering, stability of structures, optimization, structural identification, nondestructive evaluation of large structures, and numerical simulation of complex structures. He is a member of several professional associations for engineers and also serves as associate editor of the Journal of Constructional Steel Research. He earned his PhD and master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Colorado State University.

Venkatesh Kodur (Fig. 3) is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and also serves as director of the Center on Structural Fire Safety and Diagnostics at Michigan State University (MSU). Before moving to MSU, he worked as a senior research officer at the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC), where he carried out research in the structural fire safety field. He received his M.Sc. and PhD from Queen’s University, Canada, in 1988 and 1992, respectively. Dr. Kodur’s research has focused on the evaluation of the fire resistance of structural systems through large-scale fire experiments and numerical modeling, characterization of the materials under high temperature (constitutive modeling), performance-based fire safety design of structures, and nonlinear design and analysis of structural systems. He has collaborated closely with various industries, funding agencies, and international organizations, and has developed simplified design approaches for evaluating fire resistance and innovative and cost-effective solutions for enhancing the fire resistance of structural systems. Many of these design approaches and fire resistance solutions have been incorporated into various codes and standards (National Building Code of Canada [NBC], American Concrete Institute [ACI], ASCE, Society of Fire Protection Engineering [SFPE]). He has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers in international journals and conferences in structural and fire resistance areas and has given numerous invited keynote presentations. He is a professional engineer, fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, fellow of ASCE and ACI, and member of SFPE and the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering. He is also chair of the ASCE-SFPE Standards Committee on Structural Design for Fire Conditions, chair of the ACI-The Masonry Society (TMS) Committee 216 on Fire Protection and a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Committee (EPSRC, UK) College of Reviewers. He has won many awards, including the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) Faculty Fellowship Award for innovation in structural steel design and construction (2007), NRCC outstanding achievement award (2003), and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) award for collaborative research. Dr. Kodur was part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)/ASCE Building Performance Assessment Team that studied the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings as a result of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Qiu-Sheng Li (Fig. 4) graduated from Shanghai Jiao-Tong University with B.Eng. in 1984 and from the Harbin Institute of Technology with M.Eng. in 1987. He obtained his PhD and the best PhD thesis award from the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University, Australia. Before joining the Department of Building and Construction at City University of Hong Kong in 1996, Dr. Li had seven years of working experience as a research engineer at the Kajima Corporation in Japan and as a consulting engineer in MEL Consultants in Australia. During this period, he was involved in numerous wind engineering and structural dynamic studies on major building and structural developments both in Australia and overseas. His main research interests and technical expertise are in wind engineering, structural dynamics, earthquake engineering, computational mechanics, and reliability and risk assessment. Over the last twenty five years, Dr. Li’s research in these fields has resulted in over 200 refereed international journal papers. He is a coauthor of three books on structural dynamics, earthquake engineering, and structural reliability. Dr. Li has received several awards for his academic contributions, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China’s Outstanding Overseas Scientist Award in 2004, the Professor K. H. Hunt Award in 1997, and the National Second Award of China for Outstanding Research in Science and Technology in 1992 and 2004. He was appointed as Cheung Kong Chair Professor by the State Education Ministry of the People’s Republic of China and Li Ka Shing Foundation, Hong Kong, in 2007. Dr. Li has also been engaged in consultancies for both private and public sectors in the areas of structural health monitoring, wind tunnel testing, and computational fluid dynamics.

Judy Liu (Fig. 5) is an associate professor in the School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University. She has a bachelor’s of architectural engineering (BAE) from the Pennsylvania State University and a master’s and a PhD in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Liu has been active in research related to performance evaluation and renewal of structures, with a focus on steel structures. Her research has also included innovative materials and systems. Dr. Liu was awarded a Faculty Fellowship by the AISC and is working on development of a steel slit panel system for lateral resistance of steel-frame buildings. On a team with investigators at Lehigh and Princeton universities, Dr. Liu has researched self-centering damage-free steel-frame systems for seismic resistance through a Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) grant. Other research activities include evaluation of the long-term effects of super heavy-weight vehicles on highway bridges, rehabilitation of a traditional slab on a steel girder bridge with fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) deck panels, development of bridge deck testing criteria, and performance evaluation and development of serviceability criteria for FRP deck panels.

Andrea Surovek (Fig. 6) is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. She received her BS, BA, and MS degrees from Purdue University and a PhD in civil engineering from Georgia Tech. In addition to her academic position, her professional experience includes new structural design for commercial construction with an emphasis on steel superstructures, structural condition assessments, forensic investigations, and design for structural rehabilitation. She is a registered professional engineer in the states of Texas and South Dakota. Her research interests focus on stability and behavior of steel systems and development of design methodologies. She is the coauthor of the textbook Structural Stability of Steel: Concepts and Applications for Structural Engineers, with Dr. Theodore Galambos, and she was written or coauthored numerous other publications related to the topic of structural stability. Dr. Surovek serves on the Executive Committee of the Structural Stability Research Council (SSRC), where she formerly chaired the task group on frame stability. She is currently the chair of the ASCE/Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) Committee on Structural Members for the Metals Division. Her awards include the 2001 SSRC Vinnekota Award, the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Beer and Johnston Outstanding Mechanics Educator Award, and the ASEE Seeley Fellowship.

In this penultimate issue for 2009, we have three papers on the theme of analysis and computation, five papers on metal and composite structures, two papers on seismic effects, and one each on special design issues and structural optimization. Also included is a discussion on a paper dealing with slenderness and second-order effects in columns followed by the original writer’s closure.