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Welcome!

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I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR).  

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I have more than 15 years of progressive and diversified academic and industry experience in Structural Engineering. Before joining UNR, I worked as a senior engineer in Industry and as a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. My Ph.D. is in Structural Engineering from UC San Diego. Prior to that, I worked as an engineering consultant, an academic lecturer, and an entrepreneur.

My academic background covers four fields of interest:

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  • Wildfire Engineering: science and technology developments towards disaster management

  • Integration of models with data for data assimilation, estimation, identification, and uncertainty quantification

  • Data-informed monitoring, condition assessment, diagnosis, and prognosis of engineering systems

  • Computational structural mechanics 

  • Large-scale experiments and structural behavior study

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As an academic researcher, I enjoy questioning, investigating, thinking, and exploring. The broad reach of my research interests stems from my passion to pursue new learning opportunities. As a teacher, I strive to convey my passion, knowledge, and technical experience to students in an engaging and stimulating manner. I believe research and teaching should not be confined to purely scholastic materials, but rather, it should bridge the gap between theory and practice.

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My academic future lies in the marriage of the realm of the scholastic with the real-life world of engineering. Moving forward, I expect my academic research and interests to be increasingly geared toward addressing existing and new problems using creative technology solutions to improve the quality of our lives and better safeguard our assets. 

FAVORITE QUOTE

 

We are the children chasing wondrous thrills
Chasing a vision, baby, like we're running downhill

 

― "Alive" Song by NEEDTOBREATHE

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