Prof. Yousef Bozorgnia Receives 2021 V. M. Watanabe Excellence in Research Award

UCLA Samueli School of Engineering Newsroom announced on Monday, May 17, 2021 that Prof. Yousef Bozorgnia receives the prestigious 2021 Watanabe Excellence in Research Award.

Prof. Bozorgnia is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCLA, and Director of the Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3), headquarters at the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences. Bozorgnia’s expertise includes earthquake engineering and seismic ground-motion hazard. His highly impactful research papers on seismic hazard analysis and structural earthquake engineering have been extensively published in peer-reviewed journals. Bozorgnia has been the principal investigator of the Next-Generation Attenuation (NGA) projects, a set of large multi-researcher and multi-institution projects with worldwide impacts on seismic hazard analysis and design. In addition, he is the principal investigator of numerous large multidisciplinary research projects at UCLA, including seismic risk analyses of natural gas and water infrastructure, seismic geohazard analysis of lifelines, earthquake analysis of smart cities and probabilistic fault-displacement hazard initiative. Bozorgnia received his B.S. degree from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UC Berkeley. He has been a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers since 1998. In 2019, three U.S. scientific organizations — EERI, COSMOS and SSA — jointly awarded Bozorgnia with the prestigious Bruce Bolt Medal for his extensive contributions to seismic hazard analysis and earthquake engineering.

Full Article by UCLA Samueli Newsroom

UCLA Collaboration on COVID-19 Survey Project in New York Times: TheUpshot

In a collaboration facilitated by the Center for SMART Health (supported by the UCLA Institute for Precision Health, Garrick Institute for Risk Sciences, and Clinical and Translational Science Institute), researchers in the UCLA School of Medicine (team led by Arash Naeim) and Political Science (team lead by Lynn Vavreck) have been involved in a large scale nationwide survey project called the UCLA COVID-19 Health and Politics Project with UCLA colleagues Neil Wenger (primary care provider, ethicist), Annette Stanton (health psychology), and a Harvard colleague Karen Sepucha (decision science).

This collaboration, which is still ongoing, has interviewed over 75,000 individuals over the last 10 months, measuring people’s pandemic experiences and attitudes along political and economic dimensions as well as physical and mental health well-being. Recently, the project has assessed the effectiveness of different messages on vaccine uptake which was highlighted in the NYT Upshot article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/upshot/vaccine-incentive-experiment.html.

Thumbnail image source: Wikimedia Commons; Copyright: Adjoajo

Wadie Chalgham 2nd place graduate student winner of the 2020 SER2AD Student Safety Innovation Challenge

Congratulations to Wadie Chalgham, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, for his paper being accepted as the 2nd place graduate student winner of the 2020 SER2AD Student Safety Innovation Challenge. He will be awarded and will present his paper during the IMECE 2020 conference in Portland, Oregon on November 15-19, 2020.

Congratulations Class of 2020!

To the Class of 2020,

On behalf of the Garrick Institute, we want to extend our warmest congratulations to you on reaching this major milestone in life. Your hard work, patience, perseverance, and creativity has paid off. We recognize the last few months have been extremely difficult. However, you’ve managed to see the light during these dark times and your accomplishments will not be diminished. Together, we will continue to engineer change for the current and future generations to come.

Congratulations!

School of Engineering Virtual Commencement: Saturday, June 13 at 12:30pm PDT

Special shout out to GIRS Class of 2020!

Keo-Yuan Wu, Ph.D.
Materials Science and Engineering

Jaehyeong Lee, B.S.
Computer Science and Statistics

Amruth Mohan, M.S.
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Omar Issa, B.S.
Civil Engineering