Civil Engineering is by far the oldest engineering discipline and civil engineers are responsible for many of the most significant advances in human civilization from large-scale water distribution to complex road and rail networks and the build-up of major urban business centers through, for example, high-rise building construction and intricate public transportation systems. But the infrastructure challenges we face today remain as daunting as at any point in history. It’s no longer sufficient to simply make the beam larger, the pipe wider, or add another lane of traffic. We need our infrastructure to be smarter, use fewer resources, last longer, be environmentally conscious, and yet capable of withstanding the forces of natural and manmade hazards. In other words, we need civil engineers who understand the complex physics of materials under extreme conditions, the advanced analytics of the data sciences, the economics of energy markets, the mathematics of optimization and probability, and the power (limitations) of computational modeling and simulation. At the same time, the civil engineer of tomorrow must possess the practical acumen to devise real-world solutions. In this talk, I discuss how graduate research in the Dept. of Civil Engineering at Johns Hopkins University aims to push the field of civil engineering to face these challenges and educate the next generation of civil engineers to tackle the most difficult technical challenges facing our society.

Bio: Michael Shields is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Civil Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and holds a secondary appointment in the Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering. Prof. Shields conducts methodological research in uncertainty quantification (UQ) and stochastic simulation for problems in computational mechanics with applications ranging from material modeling to reliability analysis of large-scale structures. He holds bachelor’s degrees in physics and civil engineering from Loyola University Chicago and Columbia University respectively, and received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics from Columbia University in 2010. From 2010 – 2013 he was employed as a Research Engineer in applied computational mechanics at Weidlinger Associates, Inc where he studied the effects of extreme loads on large-scale structures. He joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 2013. For his work in UQ, Prof. Shields has been awarded the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and the NSF CAREER Award.