| Satish Nagarajaiah | |
| Citizenship: | American |
| Education: | Ph.D., F. NAI, Dist.M.ASCE, F.SEI |
| Alma Mater: | State University of New York at Buffalo Indian Institute of Science Bangalore University - Visvesvaraya College of Engineering |
| Occupation: | Professor, Researcher |
| Known For: | Structural engineering, Structural dynamics, Seismic isolation, Structural control, Monitoring, Sparse System Identification, Sensing with Nanomaterials, and Physics Guided Machine Learning (PGML) |
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| Awards: | Nathan N. Newmark Medal (2020) Raymond C. Reese Research Prize (2017) Takuji Kobori Prize (2019) Leon S. Moisseiff Award (2015) |
Satish Nagarajaiah is an Indian-American academic professor, who teaches and conducts research in the departments of civil engineering and of mechanical engineering at Rice University. He was elected in 2019 to the United States National Academy of Inventors. He got elected in 2021 as Distinguished Member of American Society of Civil Engineers for achieving eminence in structural engineering, in 2017 as fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and in 2012 as fellow of ASCE's Structural Engineering Institute. He has been honored with the 2020 Nathan N. Newmark Medal, 2017 Reese Research Prize, 2015 Leon S. Moisseiff Award from the ASCE. He is considered an authority in seismic isolation and adaptive stiffness structural systems and is known for his contributions to structural engineering.[1]
He received a bachelor's degree in structural engineering from Bangalore University in 1980 and completed his Master's in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1982. After completing his education in India, he worked as the lead structural engineer with Tata Consulting Engineers till 1986.[2] He earned his Ph.D. (1987-1990) from The State University of New York at Buffalo, where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher till 1993, and then as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia from the year 1993 to 1998. In 1999, he joined the Rice University faculty.
Nagarajaiah's career involves teaching, research, consulting, and service focused on Structural dynamics, Seismic isolation, Structural control, Monitoring, Sparse System Identification, Sensing with Nanomaterials, and Physics Guided Machine Learning.[3]
During and after obtaining his Ph.D. he worked with UB's MCEER researchers and co-authored nine technical reports for the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER) with Andrei M Reinhorn and Michael Constantinou and other collaborators on three different federal grants. He developed the 3-D BASIS class of computer programs for the response-history analysis of seismically isolated buildings while researching through MCEER. These programs featured developments that Computers and Structures later adopted to develop the widely used programs, SAP2000 and ETABS.[4]
Nagarajaiah has invented numerous devices and systems to protect structures from damaging vibrations, including those caused by earthquakes. These include semiactive and smart systems with variable stiffness and adaptive passive versions of both tuned mass dampers and negative stiffness systems.
He has also co-invented structural monitoring technologies that include strain-sensing nanomaterials and noncontact, laser-based smart strain-sensing skin.[5] [6] He has also developed advanced nonlinear structural dynamic analysis techniques that have been widely used to analyze and design structures, including the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, San Francisco International Airport, Exxon, and Apple Inc. He holds four patents in the field of structural engineering.
He has served on the American Society of Civil Engineers's Structural Engineering Institute Board of Governors from 2015 to 2019. He was the founding chair of the ASCE-Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) structural health monitoring committee from 2004 to 2006. He also served as chair of the ASCE SEI structural control and sensing committee from 1998 to 2002.
He served as the managing editor of ASCE's Journal of Structural Engineering from 2011 to 2018. He is the editor of the Structural Control & Health Monitoring International Journal, published by Wiley, and editor-in-chief of the Structural Monitoring & Maintenance International Journal (North America edition), published by Techno-press.[7] He has also authored two books and has published over 350 journal and conference articles.
Nagarajaiah has received the following accolades for his research and work;