Frangopol awarded honorary doctorate

Dan Frangopol

Dan Frangopol, the Fazlur Rahman Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture, has been awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa (Honorary Doctorate) degree by the University of Liège in Belgium. The academic award was presented March 20 on the university’s Sart Tilman Campus.
Frangopol, who joined the faculty in 2006, is the founding president of the International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety (IABMAS) and also of the International Association for Life Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE). He is the initiator and organizer of the Fazlur Rahman Khan Lecture Series at Lehigh.
An expert in structural reliability, optimization, and life-cycle engineering, Frangopol served on the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder before his appointment at Lehigh.
He has received six awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers: the Ernest Howard Award, the Moisseiff Award, the Nathan M. Newmark Medal, the J. James R. Croes Medal, and the ASCE State-of-the-Art of Civil Engineering Award, which he has won twice.
Frangopol has also received the OPAC Award from the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering, the T.Y. Lin Medal (jointly awarded by T.Y. Lin International and the International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety), the Munro Prize from Elsevier, the Kajima Research Award, the Research Prize of the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability, and the Distinguished Probabilistic Methods Educator Award from the Society of Automotive Engineers.
Frangopol is the founding editor of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, an international peer-reviewed journal that covers advances in maintenance, management and life-cycle performance of structures and infrastructures.
He is author or co-author of more than 400 refereed publications, including books, book chapters, journal articles and papers in conference proceedings. He has also chaired and organized several national and international structural engineering conferences and workshops.
Fazlur Rahman Khan, one of the premier structural engineers of the 20th century, was the designer of the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center, both in Chicago, as well as the Hajj Terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Khan was awarded an honorary doctorate of engineering from Lehigh in 1980. Frangopol is the first holder of the Khan Chair at Lehigh.
--Kurt Pfitzer