Professor Ertugrul Taciroglu has been appointed chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. The five-year term, announced by Jayathi Murthy, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of Engineering, will begin on July 1.
Taciroglu is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. His research interests are in theoretical and applied mechanics, and structural and geotechnical earthquake engineering. He is currently leading projects studying soil/structure interaction, performance-based seismic assessments, and simulations of structural responses under extreme loads.
His honors include the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award. He was elected to be a Fellow of the Engineering Mechanics Institute of ASCE in 2015.
Taciroglu is a section editor of the Journal of Structural Engineering, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics, Earthquake Spectra, and the International Journal of Structural Control & Health Monitoring.
At UCLA, Taciroglu has served in various positions at the university and school levels, including as the chair of the Academic Senate Undergraduate Council and as the vice chair of undergraduate affairs for the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.
Taciroglu joined the UCLA faculty in 2001. Prior to UCLA, he was a post-doctoral scholar at the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also received his doctoral and master’s degrees. His bachelor’s degree is from Istanbul Technical University.
He succeeds outgoing department chair Jonathan P. Stewart.