Wu receives Alfred Noble prize from ASCE

Teng Wu, assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, received the 2016 Alfred Noble prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The award recognizes a technical paper of exceptional merit whose first author is younger than 35.

The award is made to a member of any grade of the ASCE, the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (AIME), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) or Western Society of Engineers (WSE) for a technical paper in any of their publications.

The Prize Committee, which consists of a representative of each society, noted in particular the paper’s “mathematical elegance and its critical contribution to the issue of the aerodynamics of bridges.”

Entitled “Revisiting Convolution Scheme in Bridge Aerodynamics: Comparison of Step and Impulse Response Functions,” the paper appeared in ASCE’s Journal of Engineering Mechanics in May 2014. Co-author Ahsan Kareem, Robert M. Moran Professor of Engineering, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, is co-recipient of the award.

The prize was established in 1929 in honor of Alfred Noble, past president of the ASCE and of the WSE. It consists of a certificate and cash prize of $5,500, and will be presented during ASCE’s annual convention, being held later this month in Portland, Oregon.

“We are very excited that Professor Wu’s important work on the impact of wind on bridges has been recognized with this award,” says Joseph Atkinson, professor and chair of the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering. “His expertise in the broad area of wind engineering is an asset to our bridge engineering program.”

Wu joined the UB faculty in 2014. His research examines the effects of service and extreme winds on the built environment, with an emphasis on bridges. His interests include buffeting and flutter analyses, vortex-induced vibration, rain-wind induced vibration, nonlinear aerodynamics, Volterra theory, hurricane hazard modeling, reduced-order modeling and computational fluid dynamics.

He received the Best Paper Award from the American Association for Wind Engineering In 2014.

Wu earned PhD in civil engineering from Notre Dame in 2013.