Ahsan Kareem, the Robert Moran Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences, has been selected as the 2019 recipient of the Ernest E. Howard Award by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
Established in 1954 in honor of Ernest E. Howard, a former president of the ASCE, the award consists of a gold-plated medal and cash honorarium. It is presented annually to a member of the ASCE who has made significant contributions to the advancement of structural engineering in regard to research, planning, design or construction.
Internationally known for his expertise in wind and structural engineering, Kareem has made a major impact in advancing the state-of-the-art in wind effects on structures through the characterization and formulation of wind load effect. He is a distinguished member of ASCE and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He is also a foreign fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE).
In addition to his academic duties at Notre Dame, Kareem serves as co-principal investigator and senior researcher for National Science Foundation research centers under the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) program, dealing with cyberspace infrastructure and simulation and modeling for natural hazards.
He also serves as an honorary professor at Tongji University; Southeast University; Southwest Jiaotong University; Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Central South University; and Shijiazhuang Tiedo University and guest professor at Chongqing University and Beijing Jiaotong University. Additionally, Kareem was appointed by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China as a high-end consultant to Tongji University — the highest level of appointment given to a foreign expert in China.
He has distinguished himself as an international leader through his service as the president of the International Association for Wind Engineering and has served as president of the American Association for Wind Engineering and in top-level senior leadership positions of the Structural Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Institutes of the ASCE, including chair of the Wind Engineering Division of ASCE. He currently serves as an editor and member of editorial boards on several international journals, including Engineering, a CAE publication by Elsevier.
Among his many honors are the 2017 Masanobu Shinozuka Medal from the ASCE, the 2015 Theodore Von Karman Medal from the ASCE, the 2015 Croes Medal and the Distinguished Research Award by the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability in 2013.
He has received the ASCE’s State-of-the-Art Award, was selected the inaugural recipient of the Alan G. Davenport Medal, and was awarded the Robert H. Scanlan Medal for outstanding original contributions to the study of wind-load effects on structural design and the Jack E. Cermak Medal for his contributions to the study of wind effects on structures. Receipt of the von Karman, Shinozuka, Davenport, Scanlan and Cermak medals is unmatched in the fields of mechanics and structural engineering. He was also inducted to the Offshore Technology Conference Hall of Fame in 2012.
Originally published by at conductorshare.nd.edu on June 19, 2019.