Grad Students Finalists for Prestigious Best Paper Award
08/23/2010
Two Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics graduate students were among the finalists for the Engineering Mechanics Institute 2010 student best paper competition. Badri Hiriyur was a finalist for his paper on "Uncertainty quantification in homogenization of heterogeneous microstructures modeled by XFEM" and Eleni Chatzi was a finalist for her paper on "Detection of Structural Flaws using the Extended Finite Element Method and a novel Genetic Algorithm." The awards included a $300 honorarium and certificates were presented at the conference banquet held at the University of Southern California (USC) campus in Los Angeles, CA on August 10, 2010.
Prof. Ronald Pak of the University of Colorado at Boulder awards a finalist certificate to Badri Hiriyur (left photo) and Eleni Chatzi (right photo)
Badri Hiriyur has been a graduate student in the Department since Fall 2008. He is working under the direction of Profs. Haim Waisman and George Deodatis. He obtained an MS degree from Johns Hopkins University in 2003 and a BS degree from the University of Mysore in India in 2000.
Eleni Chatzi obtained her BS and MS degrees from the National Technical University of Athens, in 2004 and 2006, respectively. She is a Fulbright Scholarship recipient and worked under the direction of Prof. Andrew Smyth until May 2010 when she graduated from Columbia with Distinction. She recently assumed a position as Assistant Professor at the Institute of Structural Engineering at ETH Zürich (homepage: http://www.ibk.ethz.ch/ch/index_EN).