ASCE has honored Jamie E. Padgett, Ph.D., F.SEI, A.M.ASCE, with the 2024 Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award for contributions to fragility, risk, and resilience modeling of multimodal transportation systems and their infrastructure components when subjected to earthquakes and other hazards.
Padgett is the Stanley C. Moore Endowed Professor and the Department Chair in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Rice University. She is a clear standout in the civil engineering field, working at the leading edge of lifeline infrastructure resilience in the face of natural hazards like earthquakes. She served actively on the Executive Committee of TCLEE for years followed by her service on ASCE's Executive Committee for Life-Cycle Performance, Safety, Reliability and Risk of Structural and Infrastructure Systems. She is well-known for her contributions to seismic fragility modeling and advancing infrastructure system resilience quantification, with a particular emphasis on lifeline transportation infrastructure and their constituents like highway bridges, roadways, railways, and intermodal stations.
Padgett has served in key leadership roles in major research centers across the nation. As a part of the NIST-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, she has served on the Center's Leadership Team for the past eight years. She has led efforts in Intermodal Transportation Infrastructure and Complex Systems Modeling, while contributing to the development of an open-source platform, IN-CORE, focused on community resilience quantification and decision support. Such efforts have lasting impacts by providing new open-source modeling environments for the broader research community, along with Testbeds of the methods within real communities. At the same time, Padgett has also served on the leadership of the National Science Foundation–funded NHERI DesignSafe Cyberinfrastructure. She has been an advocate for lifeline earthquake engineering, regional risk and resilience communities to leverage these resources, and promoted open data and model sharing. Padgett's own transportation infrastructure survey data, field reconnaissance data, OpenSees models, fragility models, hazard intensity algorithms, network computation, and visualization codes have all been published openly on this platform.
Her research has provided new approaches for seismic resilience quantification of single and intermodal transportation networks, including port-rail-highway networks; she has been on the forefront of recognizing the role of these infrastructures in affecting community resilience. Her expertise and collaboration have been sought out by practitioners and researchers worldwide, and she has been involved in translating or applying these methods to transportation infrastructure in the Central U.S., California, Canada, Brazil, and Colombia.
The Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award is presented to an individual who has made a definite contribution to the advancement of lifeline earthquake engineering.
