Masayoshi Nakashima ’81 Ph.D. recently received one of the highest honors granted to engineers when he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering as a foreign member. NAE cited him “for large-scale dynamic testing of buildings that has advanced structural earthquake engineering.”
A native of Japan, Nakashima completed his Ph.D. in civil engineering at Lehigh and then returned home. He joined the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI) of Kyoto University in 1992, was the Institute’s director from 2011 to 2013 and serves now as professor.
Nakashima has published more than 40 book chapters and nearly 200 technical articles. In 2014, he received the George W. Housner Medal from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute for making a “profound impact on the advancement of earthquake engineering” and for “seminal work in the development of hybrid simulation.” Hybrid simulation is a type of structural testing that combines physical experiments with numerical simulation.
Nakashima has also received the Moisseiff Award and the Ernest E. Howard Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Special Achievement Award from the American Institute of Steel Construction. He is a member of the Engineering Academy of Japan.
At Lehigh, Nakashima’s adviser was the late Le-Wu Lu, the Bruce G. Johnston Professor emeritus of structural engineering.
Kurt Pfitzer recently talked to Nakashima about his education at Lehigh and his career as a structural engineer. Read the full interview at the Lehigh University News Center.
-Kurt Pfitzer is Manager of Editorial Services with Lehigh University's Office of Communications and Public Affairs.
