Texas Tech University

McDonald-Mehta Lecture Series (Spring 2017): Dr. Ellen Rathje

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(Above L-R) - Dr. Kishor Mehta, co-founder of the McDonald-Mehta Lecture Series, stands beside Dr. Ellen Rathje (UT-Austin) after her presentation for the February 17 2017 McDonald-Mehta Lecture Series.

TTU's National Wind Institute (NWI) was proud to host the first Spring 2017 event of the McDonald-Mehta Lecture Series with Dr. Ellen Rathje from the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin).

Dr. Rathje, who holds the Warren S. Bellows Centennial Professorship in Civil Engineering, gave a presentation titled "DesignSafe Cyberinfrastructure: A Cloud-Based Environment for Research in Natural Hazards Engineering" to a crowded room of attendees.

(Above) - The room was filled with attendees for Dr. Rathje's lecture.

About the McDonald-Mehta Lecture Series:

The McDonald-Mehta Lecture Series is named after and funded with the endowment of Dr. Kishor C. Mehta and Dr. James R. McDonald, co-founding faculty members of the former Wind Science and Engineering Research Center (WiSE), now National Wind Institute at Texas Tech University.

Dr. McDonald is a former Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering at TTU, and 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 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, Environmental and Construction Engineering and the former Director of NWI (formerly the Wind Science and Engineering Research Center [WiSE]). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and recently served as Director of the Hazard Mitigation and Structural Engineering program at the National Science Foundation. He was Chair of the Wind Load Committee who developed the criteria for the ASCE-7-88 and the ASCE 7-95.