Professor Jonathan Stewart Receives Fulbright Award

C&EE Associate Professor Jonathan P. Stewart has won a Lecturing award under the 2004-2005 J. William Fulbright Scholarship program with Italy.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and administered with the assistance of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), the Fulbright Program has been the U.S. government’s flagship program in international educational exchange since 1946 and encompasses a number of constituent programs. The U.S. Fulbright Traditional Scholar Program sends 800 scholars and professionals each year to more than 140 countries, where they lecture or undertake research in a wide variety of academic and professional fields. Prof. Stewart was selected for the Fulbright award from a large applicant pool through an exhaustive review process conducted by CIES, the Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange between Italy and the U.S. in Rome, and the J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board.

Accompanied by his wife and three daughters, Prof. Stewart will spend four months in early 2005 lecturing at the Department of Structural and Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". Italy contains several regions of high seismicity that has given rise to an active local community of earthquake engineers and seismologists. However, collaboration between U.S. and Italian researchers has been sparse compared with interactions with researchers from other countries of high seismicity such as Japan and Mexico. Accordingly, Prof. Stewart seeks to learn more about Italian tectonics and seismicity and related Italian research activity. In turn, he intends to expose Italian colleagues and their graduate students to state-of-the-art practices and technologies associated with Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE), an emerging new paradigm that seeks to enable engineering decisions made on the basis of loss probabilities. Development of the PBEE methodology presents exciting research and educational opportunities, and has evolved considerably in recent years within a community of researchers and practitioners in the western U.S. associated with the NSF-funded Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research center, with which Prof. Stewart is very active. The information and knowledge exchange should lead to the formation of long-term collaborative relationships between U.S. and Italian earthquake engineers.