Two faculty members in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University — Jamie Padgett and Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio — have been promoted to full professor, effective July 1.
Padgett, CEE, earned her Ph.D. in civil engineering from Georgia Tech in 2007 and joined the Rice faculty that year. Her research focuses on risk assessment of structures and infrastructure exposed to multiple hazards, such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. She serves on the leadership of national and regional research centers that advance resilience modeling for infrastructure and their surrounding communities. She was recently named a Fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute of the ASCE and was founding chair of its technical committee on Multiple Hazard Mitigation. In 2011 she won an NSF CAREER Award.
Dueñas-Osorio, civil and environmental engineering (CEE), earned his Ph.D. in CEE from Georgia Tech in 2005. The following year he joined the Rice faculty. His research focuses on developing methods to measure and predict the effects infrastructure systems have on each other during normal operation and such extreme events as earthquakes and hurricanes. He is an associate member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Association for Computing Machinery and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, National Institute of Standards and Technology and the City of Houston. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2008 and the Early Achievement Research Award from the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability in 2017.