Raimondo Betti: Monitoring the Health of Our Bridges
Italian Academy Series on Sustainability
Aging U.S. infrastructure, spectacular failures and urgent maintenance needs will be discussed by Raimondo Betti (Professor, Dept. of Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University) as well as a vision of the future in which infrastructure will be able to monitor its own health, estimate its structural integrity, and launch corrective actions.
Free and open to the public. Reception follows.
This lecture is the first in the Italian Academy's series on the work of Italian scientists in the area of sustainability.
Professor Raimondo Betti received his Laurea degree magna cum laude in Civil Engineering from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 1985, his Master of Science in Structural Mechanics (1988) and PhD in Civil Engineering (1991) from the University of Southern California. In the fall of 1991, Dr. Betti joined the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University as an Assistant Professor and has been there since, being promoted to Associate Professor (1998) and to Full Professor (2002). As a professor at Columbia, he received in 1995 the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award and the 1997 Foreign Specialist Award from the Public Work Research Institute in Japan. In addition, he received, in 1996, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates in 2000. His research interests focus on monitoring the structural health of buildings and bridges, with particular emphasis on rapid damage assessment through dynamic structural response measurements, on vibration-based identification of reliable structural models, and on deterioration mechanisms in structures. His research work has been funded by National Science Foundation, California Department of Transportation, NYC DOT, and Federal Highway Administration. He is the author of over 180 publications and has been invited to many national and international conferences. He served as Chair and Vice Chair of the Dynamics Committee of ASCE Engineering Mechanics and as Associate Editor of the ASCE Journal of Engineering Mechanics. He is currently an active member of the Dynamics and Structural Health Monitoring Committees of ASCE. Dr. Betti serves also as technical advisor for bridge dynamics and monitoring to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York.
