Rice’s Jamie Padgett wins Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award

HOUSTON – (May 31, 2024) – Jamie Padgett, the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering and chair of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, has received the 2024 Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

Padgett was recognized for her “contributions to fragility, risk and resilience modeling of multimodal transportation systems and their infrastructure components when subjected to earthquakes and other hazards.”

Her research involves assessing and enhancing the resilience of structures and infrastructure exposed to multiple hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes and flooding. Much of it focuses on transportation and industrial infrastructure, including bridges, highways, railways and port facilities.

“Through better understanding of infrastructure vulnerability, potential impacts of failures and prioritizing investment needs, I hope that our work can improve the safety, economic vitality and well-being of communities,” Padgett said. “It’s an honor to receive the Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award from our professional society.”

The award was established in 1990 by the Technical Council on Lifeline Earthquake Engineering, now the Infrastructure Resilience Division, to honor Duke for his pioneering contributions to lifeline earthquake engineering. It is widely considered the top honor in the field, in which “lifelines” refer to such critical infrastructure systems as transportation, power and water.

Rice President Reginald DesRoches received the same award in 2015.

After earning her Ph.D. in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Padgett joined the Rice faculty in 2007. She is a fellow of the ASCE’s Structural Engineering Institute and was the founding chair of its technical committee on multihazard mitigation.

In 2017, she received ASCE’s Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize and in 2019 was named its Engineering Mechanics Institute’s Objective Resilience Distinguished Lecturer. Last year, Padgett earned one of Texas’ highest academic honors, the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering from the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas.

In 2022, Padgett was named to a four-year term on the executive board of the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability. She is active in the leadership of major research endeavors in the natural hazards engineering field, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology-funded Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, the National Science Foundation-funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure DesignSafe Cyberinfrastructure and the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center at Rice.

She is currently working with colleagues at Rice and Lehigh University to create partnerships across academia, federal agencies and industry in the area of catastrophe and risk modeling.

Padgett will formally receive the award during the ASCE’s annual convention to be held Oct. 8 in Tampa, Florida.

⎯ by Patrick Kurp, science writer for the George R. Brown School of Engineering

-30-

This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Image downloads:

CAPTION: Jamie Padgett is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering and chair of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

About Rice:

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of architecture, business, continuing studies, engineering, humanities, music, natural sciences and social sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,574 undergraduates and 3,982 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction, No. 2 for best-run colleges and No. 12 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.