UBC Civil Engineering Assistant Professor Mahdi Taiebat, along with his co-authors, received the 2012 Norman Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) during the ASCE annual conference held in Montreal, Canada, in October 2012.
The prestigious award recognizes a paper that “makes a definitive contribution to engineering science”. This year, ASCE chose the team’s paper “SANISTEEL: Simple Anisotropic Steel Plasticity Model,” which was published in the February 2011 issue of the Journal of Structural Engineering.
Taiebat joined the UBC Department of Civil Engineering as an Assistant Professor in July 2009. His main focus of research is on the development and implementation of advanced constitutive models for engineering materials and their applications in geotechnical earthquake engineering and soil-structure-interaction problems.
He has worked on various related research projects for the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, Shell International Exploration and Production, British Petroleum, Woodside Energy, and the Structural Engineers Association of BC.
Founded in 1852, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) represents more than 140,000 members of the civil engineering profession worldwide and is America’s oldest national engineering society.
The Norman Medal of ASCE is the highest honor that a paper in all 33 ASCE journals can receive and is the oldest medal in all engineering disciplines in the USA, dating back to 1872.