Grove School Professor Anil K. Agrawal receives top 2025 ASCE Moisseiff Award

Anil K. Agrawal, Herbert G. Kayser Professor of Civil Engineering at The City College of New York is the recipient of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) 2025 Moisseiff Award. The honor is for his paper “Reliability-Based Framework for Structural Robustness Evaluation of Bridges,” published in the ASCE Journal of Bridge Engineering, April 2024. 

The paper proposes a novel robustness evaluation approach that is suited for short, medium and long-span bridges. A significant advantage of this approach is its ability to account for, and estimate, structural robustness corresponding to different user-specified initiating events and different user-specified limit states on a common and unified basis. This approach can be used as a comprehensive tool to assess the safety of bridges in their intact and damaged conditions to facilitate critical decisions on design and retrofit needs.

Agrawal’s co-authors include his former CCNY Grove School of Engineering graduate students Qian Chen and Hong-Fan Wang; and collaborators Sherif El-Tawil (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Baidurya Bhattacharya (University of Delaware), and Waider Wong (former Project Manager at the Federal Highway Administration). 

“I am very grateful to the ASCE for the recognition and congratulate my former students for their outstanding efforts to carry out work that is so critical to ensuring the safety of our bridges,” said Agrawal. “They are true ambassadors of the CCNY and the Grove School of Engineering.”

The Moisseiff Award is one of the most prestigious awards given by ASCE’s Structural Engineering Institute to an important paper published in an ASCE journal. It recognizes substantial advances in the field of structural mechanics and design, including applied mechanics as well as theoretical analysis, or constructive improvement, of engineering structures such as bridges and frames, of any structural material.

Established by ASCE in April 1947, it is in recognition of the accomplishments of Leon S. Moisseiff, M. ASCE, a notable contributor to the science and art of structural design.   

Agrawal is a Distinguished Member of ASCE, and past chief editor of the ASCE Journal of Bridge Engineering. He has served as chair of the ASCE SEI Committee on Bridge Inspection, Rehabilitation and Monitoring and the ASCE SEI Committee on Structural Control and Sensing. He has also chaired the Engineering Mechanics Committee of ASCE’s Metropolitan Section since 2013, and is currently the vice-chair of ExCom of the SEI Technical Community Committee. 

Agrawal’s other honors include: 

  • The 2022 Research Implementation award from the New Jersey Department of Transportation for the project “NJDOT UAS/Drone Procedures Manual and Best Practices for Use in New Jersey”; 
     
  • The Raymond C. Reese Research Prize for the paper “Performance-Based Design Framework for Concrete Barriers Subjected to Truck Collision,” from the Journal of Bridge Engineering; and 
     
  • The 2015 City College of New York President’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship in Teaching and Service; 

He’s the founding Chief Editor of the journal International Journal of Bridge Engineering, Management and Research,” founded in collaboration with the FABRE Consortium of Italy. 

He has published more than 132 peer-reviewed papers, 26 major reports and more than 200 conference papers.

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Jay Mwamba
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