The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has awarded the 2014 J. James R. Croes Medalto Dan Frangopol, the Fazlur Rahman Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture and a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering (CEE), and his Ph.D. advisees Sunyong Kim and Mohamed Soliman.
                                    
The research team won for their work on the paper, “Generalized Probabilistic Framework for Optimum Inspection and Maintenance Planning,” which appeared in the March 2013 edition of the Journal of Structural Engineering. The Croes Medal is one of the two most prestigious awards given by ASCE to one of more than 7,000 papers published in all of its 34 journalsbetween July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2013.

Kim, who earned his Ph.D. in 2011, is now a senior researcher in the Central Research Institute of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd., South Korea. Soliman is close to completing his dissertation work in Lehigh’s structural engineering Ph.D. program. He is also a P.C. Rossin Doctoral Fellow in the College of Engineering and Applied Science.

The Croes Medal was established by ASCE in 1912 to recognize ASCE papers that make a definitive contribution to engineering science. It is second in merit only to the prestigious Norman Medal awarded by ASCE. Indeed, the former was named in honor of John James Robertson Croes, a past president of ASCE who was the first recipient of the Norman Medal.

The 2014 award earns Frangopol his second Croes Medal. In 2001, he and his then-Ph.D. student Michael P. Enright were honored for the paper, “Condition Prediction of Deteriorating Concrete Bridges Using Bayesian Updating,” which was also published in the Journal of Structural Engineering.

The medal award ceremony will take place in October during the ASCE Global Engineering Conference 2014 in Panama City, Panama.

Read the full story in the Lehigh University News Center.

—By Shelley Drozd