Michael L. Whiteman II received his bachelor’s degree in physics from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. At the University of Maryland, he has earned a bachelor’s degree (2015), master’s degree (2017), and PhD (2020), all in civil engineering. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Howard University, Washington, D.C. His research interests are three-fold: artificial intelligence-driven structural health monitoring to inform repair and replacement decisions; cyber-physical modeling of civil infrastructure performance to achieve robustness against natural hazards; and gradient-based and stochastic optimization of structural efficiency and performance of civil infrastructure. In his postdoc duties, he has developed numerical tools in MATLAB and Python to support a machine learning (ML) and computer-vision-based approach to structural health monitoring and developed a computational platform prototype integrating an ML model, video analytics module, and experimental data for in-situ damage detection and localization of civil infrastructure. At Howard, he has mentored three undergraduates and served as a guest lecturer. He was the 2021 recipient of the Best Paper Presentation at the 6th AAWE Workshop. As a future faculty member, he believes in the balance between exposure to research literature and physical, real-world applications. In all of his courses, Michael intends to guide students in critical thinking, the understanding and application of general principles, and brainstorming general principles in new applications.

Research Interests

structural health monitoring, cyberphysical systems, optimization