08/26/2015: Dimitrios Lignos jointed the editorial board of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering as Associate Editor.

07/01/2015: Dimitrios Lignos and Yusuke Suzuki attended the 8th International Conference on Behaviour of Steel Structures in Seismic Areas (STESSA 2015). Yusuke Suzuki gave a presentation related to Large-Scale Collapse Tests of Steel columns under Lateral Drift and Axial Load. Dimitrios Lignos gave three presentations related to the seismic design criteria for steel moment resisting frames for collapse risk mitigation, the full-scale testing of extended shear tab connections and the development of Ry, Rt factors and compressive resistances for steel braces and steel brace connections.

06/29/2015: Dimitrios Lignos gave an invited lecture for Collapse Risk Assessment of Steel Frame Buildings in Highly Seismic Regions at the Futtsu Research Laboratory of Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Corporation in Japan.

06/01/2015: Dimitrios Lignos was granted tenure by the Board of Governors of McGill University and promoted to Associate Professor.

05/28/2015: Ahmed Elkady, Sarven Akcelyan, Seong-Hoon Hwang, Julien Craveno and Aikaterini Mousteraki attended the 2015 CEISCE workshop. Seong-Hoon Hwang presented a poster related to the seismic-induced loss assessment of steel moment frames. Congratulations to Ahmed Elkady for winning the first award during the oral presentation competition.

05/26/2015: Dimitrios Lignos presented a paper as part of the 5th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering CompDyn2015. The title of the paper was Earthquake Loss Assessment of Steel Frame Buildings Designed in Highly Seismic Regions.

05/25/2015: Dimitrios Lignos and Dimitrios Vamvatsikos organized a minisymposium with 18 invited speakers as part of the 5th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering CompDyn2015. The title of the minisymposium was Loss, Risk, Uncertainty and Modeling for Seismic Performance Assessment of Structures.

04/02/2015: Dimitrios Lignos gave an invited presentation to ETH Zurich. The title of his presentation was Collapse Risk Assessment of Steel Special Moment Frames Designed with Deep Slender Wide-Flange Steel Columns.

03/23/2015: Dimitrios Lignos received the Sir William Dawson Scholar Award for Infrastructure Resilience for a five-year term. The William Dawson Scholar award recognizes a scholar developing into an outstanding and original researcher of world-class caliber who is poised to become a leader in his field, similar to that of a CRC Tier 2.
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02/26/2015: Dimitrios Lignos gave an invited presentation to University of Michigan Ann Arbor. The title of his presentation was Collapse Risk Assessment of Steel Special Moment Frames Designed with Deep Slender Wide-Flange Steel Columns.

01/30/2015: Dimitrios Lignos, Ahmed Elkady, Omar Ibrahim, Violetta Nikolaidou, Mohammad Motalebi and Nathan Goldstein gave invited presentations as part of the Annual Workshop organized by ADF Group Inc. Steel Fabricators in Montreal, Canada. The presentations covered topics associated with current and future welding procedures for high strength steel and heavy assemblies that utilize jumbo cross sections and thick plates. Experimental findings associated with the behaviour of deep wide flange steel columns in seismic applications and the design and testing of extended beam-to-girder connections and copped beams were also presented.

11/18/2014: Dr. Ramos, Prof. Mosqueda and Prof. Lignos published a new MCEER report related to the hybrid simulation of the seismic response of a steel frame building structure through collapse. The report is available from MCEER for free. You can download a pdf copy of the report from here.

10/01/2014: A new version release (Version 1.2) of the software IIIDAP. is now released. The current version runs in Windows 7 and 8.

09/26/2014: Dimitrios Lignos gave an invited webinar for modeling of steel moment resisting frames in OpenSees as part of the OpenSees Days workshop held in the PEER center at UC Berkeley. A youTube link for this presentation can be found here.

07/30/2014: Dimitrios Lignos, Yusuke Suzuki and Ahmed Elkady participated in the 10th US National Conference on Earthquake Engineering. Papers from the conference are available from the NEES website.

05/28/2014: Dimitrios Lignos received the ASCE Outstanding Reviewer Award 2013 in recognition of outstanding service as a reviewer for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Journal of Structural Engineering.

05/17/2014: Dimitrios Lignos received the 2014 Christophe Pierre Award for Research Excellence - Early Career from the Faculty of Engineering. The Christophe Pierre Award recognizes excellence and potential for future preeminence in research by academic staff in the Faculty of Engineering.

05/14/2014: Dimitrios Lignos gave an invited presentation as part of the 21st Annual CEGSS Conference at McGill University. The title of the presentation was *“Steel Frame Buildings for Improved Seismic Resilience-Collapse Risk and Earthquake Induced Losses”.

05/02/2014: Ahmed Elkady and Sarven Akcelyan attended the 2014 CEISCE workshop at Laval University. They both presented posters related to the dynamic stability of steel columns subjected to earthquake loading and the seismic retrofit of existing tall buildings with supplemental damping devices. Congratulations to Ahmed Elkady for winning the first award during the poster competition.

04/01/2014: Congratulations to Ahmed Elkady for been awarded the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS) through the national competitions by the three federal granting agencies (NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR). The NSERC awards the Alexander Graham Bell CGS to the top-ranked Postgraduate Scholarships applicants based on their academic excellence, research potential, and communications, interpersonal and leadership abilities.

02/28/2014: Dimitrios Lignos attended the Steel Structures Educators meeting organized by the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction (CISC) and the Steel Structures Education Foundation (SSEF) in Quebec City.

12/12/2013: Dimitrios Lignos and Ahmed Elkady attended the NEES/E-Defense 10th planning meeting organized in Kyoto, Japan. During the meeting Prof. Lignos gave an invited presentation with title “Current Research on the Collapse Assessment of Steel Frame Buildings Subjected to Extreme Earthquakes Beyond the Design Level”.

12/09/2013: Congratulations to Violetta Nikolaidou for completing her M.Eng Thesis with title Finite Element Modeling and Evaluation of Welding Procedures in High STrength (450 MPa: 65 ksi) W-Shape Column Assemblies. Violetta will be working as a full-time PhD student at McGill University.

12/09/2013: Congratulations to Samy Al-Bardaweel for completing his M.Eng Thesis with title Indicators for Sustainable Design of Civil Engineering Systems: Towards Earthquake Resilient Steel Frame Buildings Through Loss Assessment. Samy will be working as a structural engineering consultant in Ottawa.

10/18/2013: Nasser Al-Shawwa and Prof. Dimitrios Lignos developed a new series of web-based interactive tools for Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering.

10/03/2013: Dimitrios Lignos gave an invited presentation during the 5th Annual Quebec Steel Workshop organized by the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction in Laval, Canada, October 3rd, 2013. The title of the presentation was “Current Research on the Design, Evaluation and Fabrication of Steel Structures Subjected to Seismic and Other Loads”.

09/26/2013: Congratulations to Sarven Akcelyan for winning the first award for the best new code development submitted to OpenSees in the past year (PEER Announcement).

08/29/2013: Dimitrios Lignos gave a presentation during the Vienna Congress on Recent Advances in Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics (VEESD2013) organized in Vienna, Austria in August 28-30, 2013. The title of the presentation was “Collapse Assessment of Steel Moment Resisting Frames Designed with Deep Members”.

08/27/2013: Sarven Akcelyan gave a presentation during the OpenSees Days 2013 Workshop at Richmond field station at UC Berkeley. The title of his presentation was “Seismic Analysis and Evaluation of Steel Structures Equipped with Viscous Dampers”.

08/16/2013: Congratulations to Farbod Pakpour and Harrison Moir for winning the first award in the poster competition for the Category of Sustainability as part of the Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering (SURE) program at McGill University. The title of their poster was: “Evaluation of Extended Shear Tab Connections”.

08/13/2013: Congratulations to Nasser Al-Shawwa for completing his M.Eng Thesis with title Rapid Estimation of Earthquake Damage on Instrumented Steel Frame Buildings Using Simplified Toools: Towards “City-Scale” Building Simulation. Nasser is currently working as a research engineer at McGill University.

06/17/2013: Dimitrios Lignos gave an invited presentation in the Mini-Symposium on “Young Researchers in Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering” organized during the 11th International Conference on STructural Safety & Reliability (ICOSSAR 2013), in Columbia University, New York, NY in June 16-20, 2013. The title of the presentation was “Structural Performance Databases for Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering”. A PEER research report with the mini-symposium papers will be published later on during the year.

06/03/2013: Dimitrios Lignos and Helmut Krawinkler received the 2013 State-of-the-Art of Civil Engineering Award, for the paper “Deterioration Modeling of Steel Components in Support of Collapse Prediction of Steel Moment Frames under Earthquake Loading,” Journal of Structural Engineering, November 2011, for its contribution toward rationalizing collapse estimation for steel moment frames under seismic loading.

06/01/2013: Omar Ibrahim and Violetta Nikolaidou gave two presentations during the 2013 Canadian Society of Civil Engineering (CSCE) annual conference the presentations discussed the simulation of current welding procedures in high strength steel assemblies and assemblies that utilize thick plates.

03/01/2013: Dimitrios Lignos gave a presentation related to “predictive equations for cyclic inelastic buckling and fracture of steel braces” during the 10th International Conference on Urban Earthquake Engineering (10th CUEE) in Tokyo, Japan.

02/28/2013: Dimitrios Lignos gave an invited lecture for collapse quantification of steel structures at the Futtsu Research Laboratory of Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Corporation in Japan.

02/18/2013: Congratulations to Emre Karamanci for completing his M.Eng Thesis with title, “Collapse Assessment and Performance-Based Evaluation Techniques for Concentrically Braced Frames Designed in Seismic Regions”. Emre will next join DPHV Structural Consultants to work as a Junior Structural Engineer.

12/20/2012: Dimitrios Lignos received the ASCE Outstanding Reviewer Award 2012 in recognition of outstanding service as a reviewer for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Journal of Structural Engineering.