Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

Abstract: The seismic resiliency of civil infrastructure systems—e.g. water, energy, transportation networks—is quantified by their ability to sustain a certain level of serviceability and to recover their baseline functionality after an extreme event. The vulnerability of these systems to extreme events, however—both on the component and network levels—is widely based on empirical (heuristic) procedures that cannot capture the fundamental mechanics or characterize the associated uncertainties of the problem. The lack of rigor in state-of-the art resilient system quantification makes their applicability limited and their accuracy questionable. In this talk, I will outline a vision for combining the computational modeling capabilities with the information from our understanding of the earthquake hazard and continuous performance monitoring of the built environment to build physics-based models that could be used for the infrastructure resilient design and vulnerability assessment of the existing aging infrastructure systems.

Biography: Elnaz Esmaeilzadeh Seylabi is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at the California Institute of Technology where she currently works on developing a probabilistic framework for nonlinear site characterization and on implication of more rigorous constitutive models in ground motion simulations with the aim of improving the predictive capability of numerical models in moderate to large scale geo-seismic problems. Elnaz received her BS degree in Civil Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2007, her MS degree with Summa Cum Laude in Earthquake Engineering from the same University in 2009, and her PhD degree in Civil Engineering from the University of California Los Angeles in 2016. She is the recipient of the Dissertation Year Fellowship Award and the Martin Rubin Scholarship in recognition of her scholastic achievements among others, and serves as a member in EMI Computational Mechanics and Dynamics committees