Rice University Professor wins Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award

Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award was established in 1990 by the Technical Council on Lifeline Earthquake Engineering to honour Duke for his pioneering contributions to lifeline earthquake engineering.

Study in US: The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has awarded the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering and chair of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University - Jamie Padgett with the prestigious 2024 Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award.

Jamie Padgett is currently working with colleagues at Rice and Lehigh University to create partnerships across federal agencies, academia, and industry in the area of catastrophe and risk modelling.

As per the university, she has been recognized for her “contributions to fragility, risk and resilience modelling of multimodal transportation systems and their infrastructure components when subjected to earthquakes and other hazards.”

Her research is mostly on transportation and industrial infrastructure, including bridges, highways, railways and port facilities. She is assessing and enhancing the resilience of structures and infrastructure exposed to multiple hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes and flooding.

She commented on her achievement and the research and said, "Through better understanding of infrastructure vulnerability, potential impacts of failures and prioritizing investment needs, I hope that our work can improve the safety, economic vitality and well-being of communities. It’s an honor to receive the Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award from our professional society.”

About Professor Jamie Padgett

She joined the Rice University faculty in 2007 after earning her Ph.D. in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Jamie Padgett is a fellow of the ASCE’s Structural Engineering Institute and was the founding chair of its technical committee on multihazard mitigation.

She received ASCE’s Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize in 2017 and was named its Engineering Mechanics Institute’s Objective Resilience Distinguished Lecturer in 2019. Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas awarded her one of Texas’ highest academic honors, the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering last year.

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