Jamie Padgett, the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Rice University, has been named to a four-year term on the executive board of the IASSAR (International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability).
IASSAR states as its mission “to promote the study, research, and applications of scientific principles of safety, risk and reliability in the analysis, design, construction, maintenance and operations of structures and other engineering systems.” Its members are international leaders working in the reliability and risk analysis of engineered systems.
Another Rice faculty member, Pol D. Spanos, the Lewis B. Ryon Professor in Mechanical and Civil Engineering, is chair of the IASSAR executive board.
Padgett joined the Rice faculty in 2007 and became CEE department chair on July 1. In line with the themes of IASSAR, Padgett’s research focuses on risk assessment of structures and infrastructure exposed to multiple hazards, such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes.
Applications of her work include resilience of transportation infrastructure, from bridges to intermodal systems, and industrial infrastructure, including tanks and petrochemical facilities. Her research helps characterize multi-hazard fragility and reveals strategies to enhance resilience from the structure to community scale.
Padgett is a fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) and was founding chair of its technical committee on Multiple Hazard Mitigation. Padgett has received a 2011 NSF CAREER Award and the 2017 ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize. In 2019 she was named the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute’s Objective Resilience Distinguished Lecturer.
Padgett has published more than 200 articles in journals or archived conference proceedings in the field of structural response, reliability and life-cycle assessment. She is a member of several national technical committees within ASCE, including leadership of the Technical Council on Performance, Safety, Reliability and Risk of Structural Systems.
Padgett is the faculty director of the recently-launched Gulf Scholars Program at Rice, supported by the National Academies Gulf Research Program. She serves on editorial boards for several journals including the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering, Natural Hazards Review, Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, and Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics.
Padgett serves in leadership roles for several large national or regional research efforts, including the NIST-funded Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, the NSF-funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Cyberinfrastructure “DesignSafe-CI,” and the Severe Storm Prediction Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center at Rice.