Dr. Bocchini is a Professor of Civil Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Lehigh University, affiliated with the Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems, and Computations and the Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy.
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Dr. Bocchini is Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Lehigh University, and the Director of its Catastrophe Modeling Center. Before joining Lehigh's Faculty he worked as postdoctoral research associate and as lecturer in Italy and in the US. He received his Ph.D. in Structural Mechanics and his Laurea degree (B.Sc. + M.Sc.) in Civil Engineering from the University of Bologna. Most of his Ph.D. dissertation was developed at Columbia University, where he was a Visiting Scholar of the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. He is also an Alumnus of the Collegio Superiore Alma Mater Studiorum.
Dr. Bocchini's research activity is related to the use of probabilistic concepts, computational mechanics, operations research, and other numerical tools in civil engineering problems. Most of his recent research deals with infrastructure and community resilience under natural disasters, to support decisions on design, retrofit, preparedness, damage mitigation, and recovery of critical infrastructure systems. He is also the founder of the Catastrophe Modeling Center at Lehigh University.
Dr. Bocchini served as Principal Investigator of the PRAISys project, a multi-million dollar effort supported by the National Science Foundation that involved 58 scholars (43% from underrepresented groups in STEM) over 5 years to model and predict in a probabilistic sense the damage, recovery, and resilience of interdependent infrastructure systems. Dr. Bocchini was elected Fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute of ASCE, he authored the chapter on infrastructure interdependencies in the Objective Resilience Manual of Practice of ASCE, served in a committee of the National Academies to develop guidelines for the U.S. Congress to allocate resources to projects that improve resilience, and received a number of awards and recognitions.
Some side projects related to past research topics involve advanced techniques for the simulation of random functions; structural identification and damage detection in truss structures and in pipelines for oil and gas; 3D printing of concrete by selective binder activation; numerical tools for non-destructive testing by means of guided ultrasonic waves; stochastic finite element methods; advanced rheological models and pre- post-processing tools for ceramic materials. A complete list of publications is available here.