The need for a qualified workforce in information technology and the broader science-technology fields, referred to as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) has reached crisis proportions. Native born U.S. students are not entering the STEM fields in college in sufficient numbers to avoid an impending technology-talent shortage. University enrollments are dwindling in the STEM...

Conventional design of steel plate shear walls SPSWs assumes that 100% of the story shear is resisted by each infill panel. Following this approach, strength provided by the boundary frame moment resisting action, which provides the SPSW with overstrength, is neglected. While this design assumption has a positive impact on seismic performance of SPSWs, no analytical work has been done to quanti...

This article is the first of a pair of articles that estimate regional and local strong motions from the 1923 Kanto, Japan, earthquake. This Ms 8.2 earthquake caused the most devastating damage in the metropolitan area in Tokyo history. In this article, we first calibrate wave propagation path effects with a moderate-sized modern event. This event, the Odawara earthquake of 5 August 1990 (M 5.1...

Seismic rehabilitation provides existing buildings with more resistance to seismic activity, ground motion, or geotechnical failure due to earthquakes. Performance-based rehabilitation is a general concept through which the retrofitting criteria are defined regarding to performance objectives when the structural and nonstructural members are subject to different levels of earthquake hazards. In...

Setback in elevation of a structure is a special irregularity with considerable effect on its seismic performance. This paper addresses multistory Reinforced Concrete (RC) frame buildings, regular and irregular in elevation. Several multistory Reinforced Concrete Moment Resisting Frames (RCMRFs) with different types of setbacks, as well as the regular frames in elevation, are designed according...