ABSTRACT

After years of underinvesting in the Nation’s infrastructure, federal and state departments of transportation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, electric utility companies, and other decision-makers need accurate and timely information about an infrastructure’s health to prioritize investment decisions. Unfortunately, there are currently no broadly applicable automated tools to assess infrastructure health degradation and to support data analytics. Traditional monitoring methods are not sufficiently reliable to inform critical resource allocation decisions. To improve the accuracy of evaluating infrastructure health, (AI)-driven research developments are necessary to timely inform on evacuation, maintenance, repair, and replacement decisions.

In this seminar, Dr. Marin will discuss learning experiences of an ongoing multi‐disciplinary research program that is trying to develop (AI)-driven components for structural monitoring and assessment of real-world structures.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Claudia Marin is a professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Graduate Student Director of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Howard University in Washington, DC.

She holds a master’s and a Ph.D. degree in Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering from the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.

Dr. Marin’s primary research interests include computational mechanics, experimental evaluation of large-scale structural and nonstructural components, and structural health monitoring.

The National Science Foundation has sponsored her research projects, funding to support independent, collaborative, and multi‐disciplinary research programs, including the prestigious CAREER award. The primary theme of her research is the development of protective systems to improve the performance of bridges, buildings, and their contents under seismic and other extreme loads. She has significant contributions to large-scale experimental testing, field monitoring of built structures, working with a large number of undergraduate researchers, and obtaining industry cooperation. She is the founder and advisor of the Engineering Ambassador Program at Howard University, which since 2011 serves to engage undergraduate engineering students as ambassadors in K-12 outreach activities and stimulate the ambassadors’ interest in STEM, soft skills, self-efficacy, and academic achievement. She is a registered professional engineer in Virginia, Maryland, New York, Arkansas, and the District of Columbia. She had more than seven years as a professional structural engineer before joining Howard University.