2:57 p.m., April 7, 2009----Jeremy Isenberg, senior principal with AECOM and member of the National Academy of Engineering, will deliver the fourth annual Arnold D. Kerr Lecture in Engineering Mechanics on Tuesday, May 5, at 4 p.m., in the University of Delaware's Mitchell Hall. The lecture, “Protective Design -- 30 Years of Evolution,” will be preceded by a reception in the DuPont Hall lobby at 3:30.

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Isenberg will discuss how changes in the threats to world and national security have influenced the analysis and design of protective structures. These changes, including the end of the Cold War and the rise of terrorist threats, have required new thinking from engineers responsible for designing safe structures, according to Isenberg.

“Military structures from the Cold War era, such as missile silos, were required to survive very large explosions with little or no damage,” he says. “As added protection was sought by embedding the structures in soil or rock, soil-structure interaction and soil modeling were critical components of design and supporting analysis. In the post-Cold War era, some damage must be accepted in civilian structures exposed to terrorist acts. Life safety and confining damage to the region of the attack have become primary considerations.”

Isenberg, who is a licensed engineer in five states, received his undergraduate education in civil engineering at Stanford University and his Ph.D. in structural engineering at Cambridge University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Isenberg contributed to the design and analysis of protective structures exposed to blast. His ideas and implementation led to the integration of design with hardness assessment of such structures and exploited, for the first time for such structures, confined concrete to achieve greater strength and ductility. This work led to his receiving the 1997 Ernest E. Howard Award of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

Data that Isenberg collected from U.S. earthquakes on the seismic performance of pipelines using utility maps, repair reports, and interviews clarified the relationship between maintenance of water pipelines and their seismic performance. He also maintained for 17 years a field experiment involving instrumented, buried pipelines across a strand of the San Andreas Fault.

For his contributions to the practical implementation of technology for seismically resistant pipelines and to lifeline earthquake engineering generally, Isenberg received the 1998 C. Martin Duke Award of ASCE. In 1999, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to protective construction and lifeline earthquake engineering. In 2007, he was elected an Honorary Member of ASCE.

Isenberg is also the 2009 recipient of the ASCE Outstanding Projects and Leaders lifetime achievement award in design and the author of more than 60 publications.

Sponsored by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), the engineering mechanics lecture series was initiated in honor of Arnold Kerr, Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering, upon his retirement in 2004. He is an internationally recognized expert in engineering mechanics, with a particular focus on railway engineering.

“We are thrilled to have yet another distinguished engineer as a Kerr lecturer,” said Tripp Shenton, CEE chairperson. “This is the fourth talk in the annual series, and every year we have been successful in attracting a very high-quality speaker.”

Past lectures in the Kerr series have been delivered by Henry Petroski, author of more than a dozen popular books on engineering-related topics; Donald Billington, professor at Princeton University; and Charles Thornton, a world-renowned structural engineer who has made significant contributions to the investigation of major failures including the collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers.

The Kerr lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Marikka Beach at 831-2442 or [marikka@udel.edu].

Article by Diane Kukich