Thursday, April 12, 2012, 140 DeBartolo Hall, 3:30pm

Engineering Wood-Frame Buildings for Wind and Seismic Loading
Dacid Rosowsky Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE
Dean of Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

Wood-frame buildings, primarily residential structures and other low-rise buildings, are ubiquitous in the US, and continue to represent the dominantstructure type today. Following devastating (economic) losses from recent US hurricanes and earthquakes in recent decades, the structural engineering community has responded with significant advances intended to reduce vulnerability and mitigate economic losses from natural disasters. Many of these advances have focused on understanding the behavior and being able to predict the performance of wood-frame structures, through a combination of component level and full-scale structural tests (experiments) and computational modeling (analytical) efforts. This work has resulted in improved understanding as well as new techniques for construction in high hazard regions. With the trend of population migration to the coasts and the rapid increase in housing construction in some of the most vulnerable areas of the country, changes in materials and construction techniques, and suggestions that we could be moving into a period of increased hurricane activity, the need has never been greater for this research.
In this talk, we also discuss some of the most recent wood-frame structural testing programs – including tests of full-size buildings – and highlight what we have learned from these tests and how such large-scale testing can be used to both inform and validate new design philosophies. One such design approach, direct displacement design, is highlighted using a 6-story building as an example. This building was tested on the world’s largest shake-table located near Kobe, Japan.

David V. Rosowsky was appointed the 15th Dean of Engineering at Rensselaer in 2009. From 2004-2009, Dr. Rosowsky served as Head of the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, where he also held the A.P. and Florence Wiley Chair in Civil Engineering. Since 1990, Dr. Rosowsky has conducted research in the areas of structural reliability, performance of wood structural systems, design for natural hazards, stochastic modeling of structural and environmental loads, and probability-based codified design. His current research addresses three topics: (1) behavior of the built environment subject to natural hazards, (2) modeling and analysis of load effects on buildings and other structures, with particular emphasis on complex environmental phenomena, and (3) performance-based engineering for design, post-disaster condition assessment, and loss estimation studies. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Structural Safety and is a past editorial board member of the ASCE Journal of Infrastructure Systems, the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering and the journal Natural Hazards Review.
Dr. Rosowsky has authored or co-authored more than 140 papers in peer-reviewed journals and more than 150 papers appearing in conference proceedings. A recognized expert in the field of structural reliability, he has been invited to present his research work around the world including invited lecturers in France, Italy, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. He has supervised more than 20 Masters and Doctoral students. He is the recipient of the ASCE Walter L. Huber Research Prize, the T.K. Hseih Award from the Institution of Civil Engineers (UK), and the ASCE Norman Medal.
Dr. Rosowsky maintains an active research program in wind and earthquake engineering and continues to supervise graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. He is a member of numerous editorial boards, national technical committees, is a registered Professional Engineer, and holds the rank of Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.