Bilal Ayyub Chairs ASCE Infrastructure Resilience Division

Professor Bilal Ayyub has been named chair of the Infrastructure Resilience Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) for fiscal year 2017-18.

The division develops resources for improving the hazard resilience of civil infrastructure and lifeline systems. Ayyub was a founding member of the working group that originally formed the division in 2014.

A five-person executive committee led by Ayyub oversees the division’s work on more than 20 ongoing projects focused on disaster assessments, multihazard characterization, risk and resilience measurements, social and economic impacts, and other key issues. Projects slated for completion before the end of fiscal year 2018 include the creation of a manual of practice for the seismic design of water and wastewater pipelines, next generation of performance standards and guidelines for the systems and components that make up the built environment, and an intensity scale based on life and property loss that emergency managers and public officials can rely on when assessing disasters—a project led by Ayyub himself.

An ASCE Distinguished Member, Ayyub directs the Center for Technology and Systems Management at the University of Maryland, where he is also a strategic advisor to the Center for Disaster Resilience in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is the author and co-author of more than 600 publications, including 8 textbooks and 14 edited books, and recipient of the 2016 Solberg Award from the American Society of Naval Engineers.

Published May 16, 2017