Michael Pollino, assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, recently secured a $599,603 grant from the National Science Foundation—a major accomplishment for faculty at the assistant professor level—for the project “NEESR: Seismic Rehabilitation of Substandard Building Structures through Implementation of Stiff Rocking Cores.”
Pollino’s work brings significant expertise to a critical issue in the United States: problems of aging infrastructure coupled with natural disasters such as earthquakes. The NSF-funded research is to investigate a seismic rehabilitation technique for sub-standard multi-story buildings, which implements stiff rocking cores and energy dissipating devices to enhance building performance during earthquakes. The research includes advanced analytical models for calculation of building response during earthquakes and near full-scale experimental testing of a three-story building frame.