Expert Available on Earthquakes and Damage in Turkey and Syria

Newswise — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Mourad Zeghal, professor of civil and environmental engineering, is available for comment on the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. He can speak on ground motion during earthquakes, soil-structure interaction, and damage to buildings and infrastructure.

Zeghal’s research interests include geotechnical earthquake engineering, seismic response monitoring, information technology applications in geomechanics, and computational soil micro-mechanics.

Failure of geosystems due to natural or man-made hazards such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, or terrorist attacks may have monumental repercussions, sometimes with dramatic and unanticipated consequences on human life and the country’s economy. Zeghal’s research focuses on three areas that are central to the national effort to reduce the impact of these hazards: (1) monitoring and testing of  soil systems, (2) multiscale modeling of soil-systems and model validation, and (3) development of improved optimal analysis and design tools.