McDonald-Mehta Lecture Series 2016 - Dr. Andrew Whittaker

The National Wind Institute kicked off the Fall 2016 semester with the first in the McDonald-Mehta Lecture Series. NWI hosted Dr. Andrew Whittaker, Professor, Department of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering, at the University at Buffalo in New York.

(See photo at top.)

Titled, "Seismic Isolation of Structures, Components, and Systems in Safety-Related Nuclear Facilities", the lecture was well attended with plenty of questions at the end of the talk.

The McDonald-Mehta Lecture Series is named after and funded with the endowment of Dr. Kishor C. Mehta and Dr. James R. McDonald, founding faculty members of the National Wind Institute at Texas Tech University. The lecture series invites nationally-known scientists and experts in wind-related fields to speak about ongoing research around the world.

Dr. McDonald is a former Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas Tech. He specialized in research related to tornado hazards, windborne debris, and the design of buildings and structures to resist extreme windstorms. He has conducted more than 30 years' worth of on-site damage documentation and more than a dozen on-site damage documentation studies with the late Dr. Ted Fujita.

Dr. Mehta is a P. W. Horn Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the former Director of NWI (previously known as the Wind Science and Engineering Research Center or WiSE). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation at the National Science Foundation.

The next McDonald-Mehta Lecture will be with Dr. Tim Doggett(Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance) who will be speaking at 3:30 p.m. on October 26, 2016 in the Experimental Sciences Building room 120. The title of his lecture will be "Catastrophe Modeling: Applications in Multidisciplinary Wind Science and Engineering." Everyone is welcome to attend.