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THE
Thirteenth THOMAS C.
KAVANAGH MEMORIAL STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING LECTURE
March 30, 2006
7:30
p.m.
Applied
Research Laboratory Auditorium}
Engineering
for security
by
Jeremy Isenberg
Recently Retired President and CEO
Weidlinger Associates, Inc.
BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCH
During
the 1970's and 1980's, Jeremy Isenberg contributed to design and
analysis of protective structures. His ideas and implementation for
energy-absorbing boundary conditions, soil-structure interface slip
and the soil-island approach made it possible to undertake, at a
time when computer capacity was much more limited than nowadays,
large-scale computational modeling of structures such as missile
silos and radar buildings exposed to blast. This made it possible
to integrate the design and hardness assessment of such structures
and to exploit, for the first time for such structures, confined
concrete to achieve greater strength and ductility. The same techniques
are being exploited in the post-cold war era at his firm, Weidlinger
Associates, Inc., to retrofit structures to resist explosions from
conventional weapons and terrorism. For this and related work in
computational structural dynamics, he received the 1997 Ernest E.
Howard Award of ASCE.
Beginning in 1975, he began collecting data from US earthquakes on the seismic
performance of pipelines. Using utility maps, repair reports and
interviews, he proposed that pipeline performance in areas where
ground motions are dominated by traveling wave effects are closely
related to the condition of the pipes as affected by corrosion. He
further proposed that poor performance due to corrosion-induced leakage
is a predictor of poor performance during earthquakes. This prediction was confirmed
in subsequent US earthquakes, and is used by utility companies in seismically
active areas to develop economical repair and replacement strategies for pipelines.
To further this work, he established a field experiment in which full-size pipeline
segments were built across the San Andreas Fault where the earthquake predicted
by USGS occurred in September 2004. Data reduction is in process. For his leadership
in the field of lifeline earthquake engineering, he received the 1998 C. Martin
Duke Award of ASCE.
In 1999 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of
Engineering, which cited him for contributions to designing and testing protective
structures and detecting seismically vulnerable underground pipelines.
Beginning
in 1987 he lead a group at Weidlinger Associates in converting computational
techniques developed for military applications to civilian uses. This has resulted
in several new technologies and software products currently in use in the optical
and medical imaging fields. One of these, a procedure for simulating ultrasound
for imaging of body tissues and cavities, is used throughout the medical ultrasound
industry for the design of efficient transducers. These techniques have reduced
the product cycle time by about 50%. Simultaneously, he personally developed
imaging software to facilitate the planning of ultrasound weld inspections required
for
nuclear power plant licensing.
His technical background was the basis for leadership of Weidlinger Associates,
the Civil and Structural Engineering firm
of which he was President and CEO from 1993 through 2005. During his tenure the
firm grew from $13M to $50M annual revenue and from 3 offices to 9. During that
period, the firm was twice recognized by Structural Engineer Magazine as the
Best Structural Firm in America to work for. During this period, he remained
active in the ASCE Technical Council on Lifeline Earthquake Engineering, whose
Executive Committee he chaired and whose quadrennial conference in 1995 he co-chaired.
During the past 9 years he has been prominent in bringing the ASCE Structural
Engineering Institute into existence --he helped to draft the original SEI Bylaws--
and to advance it toward maturity, most recently by serving as president of its
Board of Governors from 2003-2005. His contributions were recognized in the 2003
Tewksbury award of SEI.
He is recognized for synthesizing academic research
with engineering practice, serving on several university Civil Engineering Department
advisory boards and an Engineering College Dean's Council. In recent years, he
has been invited to deliver endowed lectures at University of Colorado, Stanford,
New Jersey Institute of Technology and the University of British Columbia as
well as at the forthcoming Kavanagh Memorial Lecture at The Pennsylvania State
University. He was also keynote speaker at the 2004 ASCE Engineering Mechanics
Biennial Conference.
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