Upcoming Seminars
Wildfire Engineering: Integrating Models with Data to Advance Solutions
May 21, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Hamed Ebrahimian
Wildland fires are a critical part of a healthy ecosystem. However, the rapid expansion of the wildland-urban interface, coupled with climate change and human activities, has dramatically increased wildfire hazards in recent decades. Today, wildfires rank among the most significant natural threats to social, economic, ecological, and infrastructure systems. This presentation introduces the wildfire challenge to the engineering community and highlights our team’s recent advancements in wildfire simulation, data analysis, and risk assessment.
Simulating wildfires is a complex, multi-physics, and multi-scale process essential for both pre-fire risk assessment and active-fire emergency response. This presentation provides an overview of state-of-the-art wildland fire modeling techniques, emphasizing our contributions to fuel characterization and modeling fire spotting. To address the challenges of collecting observational wildfire data, we have developed a deep learning method that enhances the spatial resolution of satellite data. This new development supports the integration of computational models and data, advancing capabilities for wildfire digital twinning and enabling near real-time wildfire monitoring for emergency response.
Additionally, the presentation outlines the development of a probabilistic wildfire risk assessment framework, inspired by decades of progress in earthquake risk engineering. This framework accounts for uncertainties across different systems to quantify wildfire risk as the probability of loss. Finally, we explore key technical challenges in wildfire monitoring, simulation, and data assimilation and present a forward-looking vision for wildfire engineering research. The objective is to engage the engineering community in addressing this critical and evolving challenge through innovative contributions.
Past Seminars
Construction Disputes and Structural Failures: In-depth Technical Investigations for Providing Answers
November 16, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Jeffrey Hunt & Joaquin Marquez
Structural failures and disputes on construction projects often leave owners, engineers, contractors, and the general public questioning “How?”, “Why?”, and “What went wrong?” Answering these questions requires detective work, technical analyses, and engineering insight. In this talk, the presenters introduce the world of forensic engineering and consulting. Case studies of a couple of recent projects will be discussed, including those that involve claimed design errors/omissions, defects, and
construction sequencing issues.
Enabling the Mass Timber Revolution: Resilience, Sustainability, and Technology
November 09, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: John W. van de Lindt
As we move through the decades since three seminal earthquakes between 1989 and 1995 occurred there has been a mega-shift toward resilience and sustainability, and the shared-use facilities within NEES and NHERI have been truly integral to this still-accelerating story; included here will be the evolution of the wood building as an illustrative example. This talk will take you back 25 years beginning in the 1990’s with woodframe research and on to performance-based seismic design of taller wood buildings.
Base Isolation of an Existing Building and Unique “Hashtag” Science Building
November 07, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Matt Skokan, Ph.D., S.E and Nofel Teldjoune, P.E. Saiful Bouquet Structural Engineers
This seminar will focus on the technical aspects of two challenging projects currently being designed at Saiful Bouquet, including one new building and one retrofit of an existing building:
- Base Isolation of an Existing Building
- Unique “Hashtag” Science Building
Developing Engaging Concept-Driven Tools and Strategies for Teaching Structural Design
November 03, 2022 - 3:00 pm
Speaker: Joel Lanning
Structural engineering students are expected to have a well-developed understanding of structural design upon graduation. However, many students achieve only a low level of understanding and design abilities amounting to “plug-and-chug” and “being able with the table.” These student outcomes are simply not acceptable when it comes to designing structures that affect the lives of countless people.
A Brief Overview Of Single-Family Home Design And Residential Structural Engineering
November 02, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Nicholas J. Martignetti and Richard J. Zabel
Mulhern + Kulp is a full-service structural engineering consulting firm, providing services to architects, builders, and developers nationwide. As one of the largest firms in the residential industry, we specialize in wood framed design, particularly single-family homes and townhomes. Please join us to learn more, as we will be reviewing some general wood construction knowledge and common terms, going over construction roles and the people involved, outlining the design services provided by Mulhern + Kulp, and discussing the importance of structural engineering in residential design.
The NHERI TallWood Project Shake Table Test of Mass Timber Building
October 31, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Jeffrey Berman
To advance the wood products market, new design solutions for tall wood buildings using mass timber products are being developed. In particular, post-tensioned rocking walls built with cross-laminated timber (CLT) or other mass timber products have been proposed as a seismic resilient lateral system. To advance the seismically resilient mass timber solutions for tall buildings, a comprehensive shake table test program of a 10-story building with mass timber rocking walls is underway. Construction and testing is taking place on the NHERI@UC San Diego outdoor shaking table.
The NHERI TallWood Project Shake Table Test of Mass Timber Building
October 26, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Keri L. Ryan
To advance the wood products market, new design solutions for tall wood buildings using mass timber products are being developed. In particular, post-tensioned rocking walls built with cross-laminated timber (CLT) or other mass timber products have been proposed as a seismic resilient lateral system. To advance the seismically resilient mass timber solutions for tall buildings, a comprehensive shake table test program of a 10-story building with mass timber rocking walls is underway.
A Journey Towards Testing A Full-Scale 10-Story Wood Building
October 24, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Shiling Pei, PhD. P.E.
Wood has thousands of years of history as a building material but has also been restricted by building codes and regulations following the industrial revolution. Wood building is viewed as a cost-effective, but less engineered system mainly for low-rise options. Mass timber construction is a relatively new way of utilizing wood material for modern, high performance buildings at both large and small scales. It gives rise to the currently trending conception of wooden sky-scrapers.
Active Architected Matter with Embedded Intelligence
October 19, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Amir H. Alavi
There is an unceasing quest to create novel forms of intelligent active matter that exhibits sensing, energy harvesting, actuating, computing, and communication functionalities. Realizing such capabilities can provide new road maps to autonomous and electronic materials with numerous applications in robotics, human-machine interfacing, micro/nano-electromechanical systems, and flexible electronics.
Analysis, Visualization, and Design
October 12, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Mike Korolyk
In nonlinear response history analysis, each project is a new adventure.
To begin with, each building is different: different material type, different architecture, different configuration, different topography. On top of that, seismic demands vary from one site to another and from one Code cycle to another.
Armed with our past experience, we build a complicated model, attempting to make the right choices with regard to granularity and elemental inputs.