Professor Eleni CHATZI
The J.M. Ko Award Committee is proud to announce the two laureates of the inaugural J.M. Ko Award. This honour is bestowed in recognition of their outstanding contributions of high originality and enduring importance that have advanced science and technology in the field of Structural Engineering.
Professor Eleni CHATZI
Professor Eleni CHATZI is the Chair of Structural Mechanics and Monitoring at ETH Zurich. She received her diploma (2004) and MSc (2006) degrees in Civil Engineering, with honours, from the Department of Civil Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, and her PhD degree (2010) with distinction from the Department of Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University.
Professor Chatzi has made substantial contributions to advancing monitoring and twinning methodologies. These methodologies merge monitoring data with engineering models in order to deliver diagnostic models of the current condition and prognostic models of the future performance of engineered systems, providing practical tools for the management of structures and infrastructural assets.
Her extensive research achievements span a variety of topics, including physics-enhanced machine learning for data-driven and explainable modelling of monitored systems, wireless and virtual sensing, and modelling and identification of nonlinear systems. Her research has both fundamental and applied value, as demonstrated by her highly-cited works and numerous international awards. Her work is driven by practical problems and has been validated on various in-service engineering systems, including transport and civil infrastructure, aerospace structures, and industrial assets, promoting the vision of self-aware structures. She has notably conducted pioneering research in the data-driven monitoring and assessment of wind energy infrastructure.
Professor Xingzheng LU
Professor Xinzheng LU is a Changjiang Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Institute of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation in the Department of Civil Engineering at Tsinghua University. He received his BEng and PhD degrees from Tsinghua University, China, in 2000 and 2005, respectively.
Professor Lu has made substantial contributions to the development of innovative computational models of engineering structures under various urban disaster scenarios. The proposed computational models and simulation methods cover multi-scale phenomena covering material, component, structure, and city scales. Notably, the building design and simulation methods developed by Prof. Lu have been adopted by Chinese national and industry standards, and have been successfully applied in multiple landmark projects worldwide, including the full-range collapse simulation of Beijing’s tallest building, CITIC Tower (528m). The city-scale nonlinear-time history analysis method developed by Prof. Lu for regional earthquake simulations has been successfully applied in earthquake scenario simulations of many major cities, and has been incorporated into regional simulations by the US-NSF NHERI SimCenter and China Earthquake Networks Centre.
Professor Lu is also a pioneer in applying AI-based methods to design engineering structures. The building structure design outcomes from these AI-based methods closely resemble those created by engineers. This emerging technology will have a significant impact on the engineering design industry.
The J.M. Ko Award, established in 2023, is named after Professor J.M. Ko (Jan-Ming Ko), the first Chair Professor of Structural Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the international journal “Advances in Structural Engineering” (ASE), in honour of his remarkable contributions as a scholar, teacher and mentor to young people in Structural Engineering.
The Award aims to promote and recognise excellence in Structural Engineering research by honouring young individuals aged 45 or under who have made outstanding contributions to science and technology in the field of Structural Engineering. The laureates are expected to have substantially advanced Structural Engineering science and technology through outstanding and systematic research of high originality and enduring importance in a well-defined focus area. For each biennial round, two young researchers aged 45 or under on the 1st of January of the nomination year will be honoured by the Award.
Each laureate of the J.M. Ko Award will receive a certificate, a medal and a cash reward of USD 5,000. In addition, each laureate will be invited and financially supported to visit The Hong Kong Polytechnic University together with his/her spouse for up to a week, and to deliver a J.M. Ko Distinguished Lecture in Hong Kong or a city in the Greater Bay Area. Each laureate will also be invited to submit a paper based on the Distinguished Lecture for possible publication in the ASE journal.
The Inaugural J.M. Ko Award Ceremony & International Symposium on Advances in Structural Engineering will take place at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University on 19 January 2024. In addition to the distinguished lectures by the awardees, presentations will also be given by other renowned scholars in the Structural Engineering field, including three members of the J.M. Ko Award Committee. （End）