Hussam Mahmoud, Ph.D., F.SEI, F.ASCE, the George T. Abell Professor in Infrastructure in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Colorado State University, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Mahmoud’s research focuses on sustainable and resilient infrastructure and communities, emphasizing developing sociophysical models to capture the recovery of systems as influenced by human behavior and socioeconomic policies. He is an international authority on these topics and an advisor to the World Bank, insurance companies, and other agencies.
His recent work on predicting the built environment’s wildfire vulnerability is set to provide a new paradigm for wildfire mitigation worldwide, and he has recently received significant funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to support this effort. In addition, his work on investigating the use of carbon and basalt fiber composites for the underwater repair of steel structures using new experimental methods provides a new approach for realistic assessment and real-world application.
Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., Mahmoud was the manager of the NEES Earthquake Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and a research scientist at Lehigh University. He has authored over 300 publications and given over 180 presentations, including 140 invited talks at national and international conferences and workshops, distinguished lectures, and keynotes. He has chaired and served on numerous technical committees, including the ASCE Committee on Fire Protection and SEI’s Executive Committee on Multihazard Mitigation.
Mahmoud is the recipient of various awards, including the American Institute of Steel Construction Early Faculty Career Award, the American Iron and Steel Institute Robert J. Dexter Memorial Lecture Award, the Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Award, the Walter Scott Jr. College of Engineering George T. Abell Outstanding Early and Mid-Career Faculty Award, and the Meroney Family Chi Epsilon Teaching Award. The U.S. National Academies recently selected Mahmoud to the 22 New Voices Cohort, representing rising leaders in their field from across the U.S.
He has been invited to various symposia by the U.S. National Academies, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He has been appointed as the co-chair of the U.S.-Africa Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine of the U.S. National Academies. His research has received media coverage through citations and interviews in numerous venues, including Nature Computational Science, Nature Climate Change, The U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Smithsonian magazine, CNN, and Forbes.
He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from the University of Minnesota and his doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
