Dan M. Frangopol, the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh, has been elected to the Royal Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in its meeting of September 20th, 2016, as a foreign member. He will participate in and contribute to the class of Technical Sciences.
The Academy was founded in 1772 by Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa―the mother of Marie Antoinette―as the Imperial and Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters of Brussels. Its mission is to promote sciences and arts in Belgium through scientific and cultural activities and cooperation between universities in Belgium and between Belgium and the larger international academic community.
Read the full version of this story in the Lehigh Engineering News Center.
Frangopol studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Liège in Belgium for three years (1974-76) and worked in Brussels for three and a half more years (1979-83) as a design engineer before joining the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2008, Frangopol was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) by the University of Liège.
His election to the Royal Academy of Belgium extends the Technical Sciences class into the areas of sustainability and resilience of infrastructure – topics in which Frangopol's research and expertise are internationally recognized.
Last year, Frangopol was elected to the prestigious Academia Europaea as one of only four foreign members in the Physics and Engineering Sciences section. The goals of the Academia include promoting a wider appreciation of the value of European scholarship and research, as well as making recommendations to national governments and international agencies concerning matters affecting science, scholarship, and academic life.
In late 2016, Frangopol was also named the inaugural recipient of the Alfredo Ang Award for Risk Analysis and Management of Civil Infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). According to ASCE, Frangopol received the award "for exceptional efforts in advancing, advocating, and persistently promoting the life-cycle cost analysis of structures and structural systems, and their integration into reliability-based structural analysis and design."
Earlier in the year, Frangopol was awarded the ASCE's prestigious Outstanding Projects and Leaders (OPAL) award for lifetime achievement in civil engineering education. Recipients of this award must be professors or deans who have demonstrated excellence and have directed or changed the course of engineering education.
