Associate Professors of Civil Engineering Santiago Pujol and Pablo Zavattieri have both been selected as University Faculty Scholars for a five year period extending through 2020.

University Faculty Scholars are select associate and full professors who have been in that rank for no more than five years and are on an accelerated path toward academic distinction. In the College of Engineering, they are nominated by committees from their academic areas, and reviewed and recommended by a subcommittee of the College's named and distinguished professors. The dean makes the selection and requests approval by the provost. University Faculty Scholars receive additional funding to support their research. The University Faculty Scholar program was created at Purdue in 1998.

Prof. Zavattieri  joined the School of Civil Engr in 2009. He received his BS and MS from the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche (Patagonia, Argentina), and his PhD from  Purdue University. From 2001 to 2009, he worked as a senior researcher, and was promoted to staff researcher, at the General Motors (GM) Research and Development Center where he led research activities in the general areas of computational solid mechanics, smart and biomimetic materials.  Prof. Zavattieri’s research lies at the interface between solid mechanics and materials engineering. His engineering and scientific curiosity has focused on the fundamental aspects of how Nature uses elegant and efficient ways to make remarkable and more sustainable materials and structures. He has contributed to the solid mechanics community by investigating the structure-function relationship of advanced materials at multiple length-scales, combining state-of-the-art computational techniques and experiments to characterize the properties, and enabling the design of new materials.

Prof. Pujol received his BSCE from the National University of Colombia, and his MSCE and PhD from Purdue University. His research interests are earthquake engineering, seismic vulnerability of existing structures, displacement-based seismic design, instrumentation and testing of structures, response of structures to impulsive loads, structural-health monitoring, repair and strengthening of structures.