The Art of Teaching | Engineering Art Lecture Series

Education and Research in Seismic Engineering
An Inextricable Gordian Knot

G. Michele Calvi
Eucentre Foundation and IUSS
Pavia, Italy

Thursday, April 20, 2017
Lecture:  4:30-5:20pm – FRNY B124
Reception:  5:30-6:15 – Wood Commons

Gian Michele Calvi is Professor at the IUSS Pavia, Italy, and Adjunct Professor at the North Carolina State University. He received a Master of Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from the Politecnico di Milano and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cujo, Mendoza, Argentina.

He has been the founder of the Eucentre Foundation and of the ROSE School; he has been a member of the Board of Directors of the GEM Foundation and is one of the Directors of the International Association of Earthquake Engineering.

He is author of hundreds of publications and of two major books: Seismic design and retrofit of bridges (with M.J.N. Priestley and F. Seible, 1996) and Displacement-Based Seismic Design of Structures (with M.J.N. Priestley and M.J. Kowalsky, 2007).

He has been designer, consultant or checker for hundreds of structural projects, including the Rion-Antirion cable stayed bridge (2883 m, in Greece), the Bolu viaduct (119 spans, in Turkey) and the new housing system after L’Aquila earthquake (2009), with 185 buildings seismically isolated with more than 7,000 devices, completed in about six months.

He is associate editor of the Journal of Earthquake Engineering (Taylor and Francis) and editor of Progettazione Sismica (IUSS Press, Pavia), a journal in Italian addressed to practitioners.

He has been invited as a keynote speaker in tens of conferences, including two World and four European Conferences on Earthquake Engineering. He has been always active in conceptual innovation in seismic design, focusing on masonry in his early days, on bridges, displacement–based design and seismic isolation from the nineties.