Doubly Honored by ASCE

Maria Garlock was doubly honored by ASCE:

In October 2024, she became a Fellow of the American Society for Civil Engineers (F.ASCE). The F.ASCE grade “represents 3% of the Society’s overall membership.” 

In April 2025, she was awarded the George Winter Award by ASCE’s Structural Engineering Institute for “integrating engineering and art in her scholarship and for promoting structural engineering as a creative discipline to a wide public.” In response she states: “Receiving this award honors some important mentors in my life: Teoman Pekoz my advisor in Cornell University, who was a student of George Winter. And David Billington, at Princeton University, who taught me that structural engineering can be art, and that engineering is about people and culture.  It is a privilege to receive this award for doing something that I love – which is to communicate to a wide audience that engineers are more than technicians – we are designers with a creative soul, and at our best we are artists.”

Doubly Honored by School of Engineering

In 2025, Maria Garlock was doubly honored by the School of Engineering and Applied Science for her scholarship as well as teaching and administrative contributions:

She is the winner of The William R. and Jane G. Schowalter Research Award. The award “is given to senior research-active faculty to recognize their exceptional research contributions to date…”

She was also appointed Daniel Tsui Professor in Engineering, “based on the quality of [her] scholarly work and teaching, as well as [her] record of administrative achievement.”

Two CRUE members given teaching award

Dean Ahdab (Ph.D. student) and Maria Garlock were honored as outstanding educators on April 5 at the annual School of Engineering and Applied Science Excellence in Teaching Awards. Organized by the Engineering Council, the awards “celebrated professors and graduate teaching assistants for mastery of academic disciplines, clarity in instruction, and dedication to their students’ growth and well-being”. Dean was honored for his Spring 2023 teaching assistantship of CEE365 Soil Mechanics, and Maria Garlock for her Spring 2023 class of CEE262 Structures in the Urban Environment. As noted in this article, recipients are selected by the votes of engineering undergraduate and graduate students. 

Climate Adaptation Workshop: Structural Design for Coastal Flood Resilience

 This by-invitation only workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, ATC Endowment Fund, and Princeton University. The overall objective of the workshop is to gather academics, practitioners, stakeholders, and other experts to discuss climate adaptable structural solutions for coastal resilience. The session themes of the workshop are: (1) State-of-Research/Practice, (2) Experimental & Numerical Capabilities & Needs, (3) Structural Engineering Design Approaches, (4) Practitioner Perspectives, (5) Educational Efforts, and (6) Identifying Goals and Gaps.  Some outcomes of the workshop will be to form connections and foster collaborations , sharing experiences and resources of climate adaptable solutions, and identifying the following: deficiencies in flood design practices, gaps in basic science, and needs in codes and standards.  A workshop report will be written and made available to the public following the event.

Information for Workshop Participants:

Download PROGRAM

List of PARTICIPANTS

Download MAP of Workshop Event locations

Download MAP of Princeton University Campus

Download REFERENCES related to the presentations

Download TRAVEL & PARKING

Travel from NHERI to Princeton

2023 NSF BRITE Award

BRITE Pivot: Advancing Knowledge in Water – Shell Structure Interaction Through Discovery of Efficient Hydrodynamic and Structural Thin-shell Forms

Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), this Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering (BRITE) Pivot project will lead to scientific discoveries in water-structure interaction, that will enable innovative approaches to coastal resilience. The path to these discoveries establishes and grows a new field, “aquatectural engineering”, which is represented by an integration of three disciplines: structural engineering, coastal engineering, and architecture. The design goals of aquatectural engineering are those of coastal hazard engineering (safety, durability, and robustness), structural art (efficiency, economy, and elegance), and sustainability (low environmental impact).  At its best, aquatectural engineering equals adaptable aquatecture, which is characterized by no/low regret strategies (relatively low cost and large benefits under predicted future climates) and has co-benefits (serves more than one purpose).  The research outcomes benefit society by enabling robust designs of coastal structures while using less mass (thus more sustainable) via thin-shell forms, and designs that are potentially more elegant and less intrusive to the community and ecosystem. In the field of structural engineering, a plethora of studies have demonstrated the significant strength of thin-shell structural forms, where “shell” refers to the inherent geometric curvature, and “thin” refers to the large span-to-thickness ratio. 

The research objective is to enable aquatectural engineering and adaptable aquatecture design goals through the advancement of fundamental knowledge in water – shell structure interaction using integrative approaches: hydrodynamic analyses, finite element structural analyses, and machine learning tools. Specifically, the research will discover efficient hydrodynamic thin-shell structural forms that have broad application to coastal resilience such as seawalls, floodbarriers, floating breakwaters, coastal bridges, and coastal building facades for example. Since thin-shell structures could be susceptible to dangerous impulse (impact) forces of breaking waves, the numerical approach includes Lagrangian-based multiphase (water and air) smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) models.  These complex models will be validated with experimental programs at small scale and large scale.  Machine learning methods will be used to (1) arrive at efficient structural thin-shell forms given wave characteristics and (2) develop predictive equations for the wave pressure on these forms.  Overall, the project will advance knowledge in the relationship between patterned thin-shell structural shapes/forms and (non)breaking wave forces. In addition, this research establishes a new interdisciplinary field, and demonstrates an integrative approach to find optimized coastal structure forms and predictive wave pressure equations.  

Shengzhe (Jackson) Wang wins a prestigious Graduate Student award

Shengzhe (Jackson) Wang, Ph.D. Candidate ’22, has been awarded an Honorific Fellowship, specifically the Wallace Memorial Fellowship, for the 2021-22 academic year.  Honorific Fellowships recognize outstanding performance and professional promise, and represent high commendation from the Princeton University Graduate School.

The award is based on his research on Kinetic Umbrellas.

This is a high honor for a graduate student at Princeton University and not many are given!

Congratulations Jackson for this well-deserved award!

The Structural Engineer as a HERO!

Inspired by the TED-Ed video by Matthew Winkler that describes the characteristics and journey of “heroes”, my colleague Ignacio Paya Zaforteza and I wrote a paper for Structural Engineer International [1] on the elements of the structural engineering hero that are parallel to the monomythical hero. The abstract states:

In the 19th century, the civil and the structural engineer received much public acclaim for their built works (e.g. Brooklyn Bridge, Eiffel Tower). One hundred years later, the engineer was perceived by many as “out” or as not requiring much skill.  This paper examines how this erroneous perception of structural engineering can change by presenting structural engineers as heroes.  Using parallels to the monomythical hero, and examples of engineers, the authors present the journey and characteristics of the structural engineering hero.  The journey, which has many paths, begins with the engineer leaving the comfortable “Ordinary World” of ordinary design into a “Special World”, where new forms, new materials, and/or scale for the project is needed. For underrepresented groups of people such as women and minorities, the heroic journey could be simply becoming an engineer and developing a career in conditions of equality and equity. As the structural engineering heroes enter the “Special World”, they may face trials of nature and criticism, and face constraints of economy, time, and knowledge.  In the final act of the journey, they return to the “Ordinary World” wiser, disseminate their knowledge, and inspire others.  The authors define the characteristics of the structural engineering heroes by four “P”s: they are prepared, they are planners, they have (super) powers, and they are persona grata.  The education of the structural engineer should train and inspire future engineers using the lessons learned from the heroes and their diversity. By doing so, what seems exceptional today, can become common in the future.

[1] Paya Zaforteza, I., Garlock, M.E.M. (2021). “The Structural Engineering Heroes and their Inspirational Journey”, Structural Engineering International (SEI), DOI: 10.1080/10168664.2021.1919038

2021 ASCE-SEI Moisseif Award

In 2021, ASCE-SEI awarded Shengzhe Wang, Maria Garlock, and Branko Glisic the  ASCE Moisseif Award for “an important paper published in a print issue of an ASCE journal”: 

Wang, S., Garlock, M.E.M., Glisic, B. (2020). “Hydrostatic Response of Deployable Hyperbolic Paraboloid Umbrellas as Coastal Armor”, Journal of Structural Engineering, ASCE, Vol. 146 (6), https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)ST.1943-541X.0002619

Structural Engineering for a Changing Climate: The Floating City

On June 3, 12:30pm (EST), ASCE’s Virtual Structures Congress held a session titled “Structural Engineering for a Changing Climate: The Floating City”, which I moderated and presented along side some colleagues as listed below. While our profession has made great strides in quantifying forces due to gravity, wind, seismic, and fire – the floating city will require learning about new forces (e.g. hydrodynamics) and innovative materials to withstand the harsh environment.  Major impediments to innovative structural solutions are policy driven – specifically – government regulations, insurance industry policy, and lack of codes and standards.This session brought together diverse panelists to stimulate discussion with the audience.  Challenges and future research needs were identified by both panelists and audience.  The hope is that a community of scholars and practitioners can be formed to continue communications and advance the vision for the future. Presenters and themes included:

  • David Odeh (Odeh Engin., Inc.): Floating City Systems
  • Maria Garlock (Princeton Univ.): Structural Design for Ocean Waves
  • Elizabeth English (U. of Waterloo, Buoyant Foundation Project): Amphibious Construction
  • Bill Nechamen (Association of State Floodplain Managers) : Regulatory Challenges