Armen Der Kiureghian

Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering Emeritus
University of California, Berkeley

President Emeritus
American University of Armenia (affiliate of University of California)

Challenges in Future Development of Structural Reliability Methods
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Friday, February 2, 2024 - 4:30 pm EST

Armen Der Kiureghian is the Taisei Chair and Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. During his service to UC Berkeley from 1978 to 2015, he held the positions of Vice Chair (1990-93) and Chair (1997-01) of the Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Materials Program, and Vice Chair for Instruction (2007-09) of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is a co-founder of the American University of Armenia, an affiliate of the University of California, and served as its Founding Dean of Engineering (1991-2007) and Interim Provost (2011-2012) concurrently with his Berkeley position, and as President (2014-2019, 2022-2023) after retiring from UC Berkeley. He has authored more than 400 publications, including two books, four edited books, and more than 130 papers in archival journals. Among other awards, he is a recipient of the American Society of Civil Engineer’s Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, Alfred M. Freudenthal Medal, Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award, and George Winter Medal; the Government of Armenia’s Movses Khorenatsi Medal and the Saint Sahak-Saint Mesrob Medal, presented by His Holiness Garegin II, Supreme Patriarch of All Armenian, for his efforts in advancing higher education in Armenia. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and an elected foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. He is a Distinguished Alumnus of Tehran University, Iran, where he received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Civil Engineering, and of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his Ph.D. in 1975.

Challenges in Future Development of Structural Reliability Methods. A variety of methods for assessment of structural reliability and for reliability-based optimal design have been developed in the past fifty years. Among methods in current use are first- and second-order reliability methods (FORM and SORM), various efficient simulation methods, and surrogate-modeling methods. After a short review of these methods, this lecture will focus on the existing challenges in applying these methods to complex real-world problems characterized by nonlinearity, stochastic dynamics, multi-phase interactions, and having high computational demand. The lecture will hopefully provide motivation to young researchers to pursue research and development in addressing some of these challenges.