Associate Professor of Geotechnical Engineering and Geomechanics Shideh Dashti has received the 2021 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize for “her work in advancing the state-of-the-art in evaluating and improving the seismic performance of structures on liquefiable soil deposits.”
The award consists of a certificate and $400 cash prize is scheduled to be presented to Dashti during the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) International Foundation Congress and Equipment Expo this upcoming May.
Recipients of the prize are selected based on the impact of their research, both on their chosen subdisciplines, as well as on the field of civil engineering more broadly. The factors used to measure the impact of research include:
- the nominee's total number of citations
- the nominee's h-index
- the nominee's total research funding received to date
- two or three letters of recommendation, where no more than one letter may be from a person employed at the same institution as the nominee.
The prize was endowed in 1964 by Mrs. Alberta Reed Huber in honor of her husband and past ASCE President, Walter L. Huber. The annual awards are intended to stimulate research in civil engineering.
Dashti runs the Geotechnics and Urban Resilience research group. She also serves as the director IRT-Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RISE) and as the director of the Civil Engineering program.
Since joining CU Boulder in 2011, Dashti’s focus has been on projects relating to Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering, promoting multidisciplinary and global approaches to engineering using innovative knowledge dissemination tools and information technology, and training engineers that are more globally-engaged in research and practice.
Dashti received her BS in Civil Engineering from Cornell University and her MS and PhD from UC Berkeley where she began her research in GeoEngineering, using centrifuge testing and numerical analyses to study the seismic response of shallow-founded structures on liquefiable soil deposits.
Congratulations Shideh Dashti on this well-deserved honor!