Congratulations to Professor Yousef Bozorgnia, who received the V. M. Watanabe Excellence in Research Award, and to Camille H. Le ’18, M.S. ’19, who received the Edward K. Rice Outstanding Master’s Student Award!
V. M. Watanabe Excellence in Research Award
Yousef Bozorgnia
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UCLA and
Director, Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3)
Yousef Bozorgnia is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA, and director of the multidisciplinary Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3). Bozorgnia’s expertise includes earthquake engineering and seismic ground-motion hazard. His highly impactful research papers on seismic hazard analysis and structural earthquake engineering have been extensively published in peer-reviewed journals. Bozorgnia has been the principal investigator of the Next-Generation Attenuation (NGA) projects, a set of large multi-researcher and multi-institution projects with worldwide impacts on seismic hazard analysis and design. In addition, he is the principal investigator of numerous large multidisciplinary research projects at UCLA, including seismic risk analyses of natural gas and water infrastructure, seismic geohazard analysis of lifelines, earthquake analysis of smart cities and probabilistic fault-displacement hazard initiative. Bozorgnia received his B.S. degree from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UC Berkeley. He has been a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers since 1998. In 2019, three U.S. scientific organizations — EERI, COSMOS and SSA — jointly awarded Bozorgnia with the prestigious Bruce Bolt Medal for his extensive contributions to seismic hazard analysis and earthquake engineering.
Edward K. Rice Outstanding Master’s Student Award
Camille H. Le ’18, M.S. ’19
Junior Development Engineer, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UCLA
Camille Le is currently working as a Junior Development Engineer at the UCLA Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. Her research interest centers on wastewater and stormwater reuse and designing built environment and infrastructure to achieve water sustainability. Le has an M.S. degree in water resources and environmental engineering from UCLA, where her research shows how to best design roadside green infrastructures to treat road runoff for water reuse. To date, Le has published three peer-reviewed publications on this topic. She has been serving as a Younger Member Chair at the Orange County branch of the American Society of Civil Engineering’s Environment & Water Resources Institute to promote sustainable water use in Orange and San Diego counties.
See all of the 2021 Samueli Award winners, along with brief highlights of their achievements: UCLA Samueli Announces 2021 Awards