Biography

Mehrdad Sasani is an Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and his MS in Structural Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic. His research and scholarship interests include: the progressive collapse of structures; earthquake engineering; and structural integrity and reliability.

Areas of Expertise (4)

Earthquake Engineering

Structural Integrity and Reliability

Design and Engineering

Community Resilience

Accomplishments (4)

BSCES/ASCE Clemens Herschel outstanding paper award

2016

Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers

2015

Fellow of Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers

2015

CAREER Development Award, National Science Foundation

2006

Education (3)

University of California: Ph.D., Structural Engineering 2001

Tehran Polytechnic: M.S., Structural Engineering 1987

Tehran Polytechnic: B.S., Civil Engineering 1985

Affiliations (13)

• Professional Engineer: Massachusetts and California
• ASCE Infrastructure Resilience Division (IRD): Risk and Resilience Measurements Committee (RRMC)
• ASCE/SEI-7: Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures, Codes & Standards Division
• ASCE/SEI-41: Seismic Retrofit of Existing Buildings Standards, Codes and Standards Division
• ASCE/SEI: Disproportionate Collapse Mitigation of Building Structures, Codes and Standards Division
• ACI-377 (Chair): Performance-Based Structural Integrity & Resilience of Concrete Structures
• ACI-374: Performance-Based Design of Concrete Buildings
• Editorial Board Member (Associate Editor) of Journal of Structural Engineering, ASCE
• SEI Boston Chapter of BSCES, Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section
• Earthquake Engineering Research Institute
• International Joint Committee on Structural Safety
• MBTA Certification Committee for concrete licensing program
• Structural Engineering Institute

Links (2)

• Faculty Page
• Google Scholar

Articles (5)

Multihazard Risk-Based Resilience Analysis of East and West Coast Buildings Designed to Current Codes

Journal of Structural Engineering

Matthew D Joyner, Mehrdad Sasani

2018 Resilience of buildings in the face of earthquakes and wind is not explicitly addressed by current building codes and standards, but the importance of a building's ability to bounce back in the face of these hazards and become functional soon after is gaining more interest. Given that the East and West Coasts of the United States pose different earthquake and wind hazards, evaluation of code-designed buildings in these two regions can provide much needed insight into the level of multihazard resilience they possess. This paper evaluates the resilience of two 7-story reinforced concrete moment frame buildings designed by current codes and standards in two cities: Boston and San Francisco. By employing new and existing models for hazard, demand, and capacity, and accounting for uncertainty, the cost and loss of function resulting from wind and earthquake hazards over the life of these two …

view more

Defining resilience for the US building industry

Building Research & Information

Margaret H Kurth, Jesse M Keenan, Mehrdad Sasani, Igor Linkov

2018 Initiatives to operationalize the concept of resilience in the building industry are rapidly emerging. The concept of resilience has introduced a way to explore solutions to some important problems in the building industry. However, much of the work that has taken place to date represents activities generally assigned to risk management, which is discussed as being inherently insufficient for sustaining the functions of the built environment under stresses...

view more

Methodology for Evaluating Community Resilience

Natural Hazards Review

Rachel Ceskavich, Mehrdad Sasani

2017 Community resilience is dependent on the functionality of building clusters and supporting infrastructure systems because these facilitate social and economic activities in a community. This paper seeks to help communities improve their resilience to natural hazards by developing a methodology, starting with estimation of a community's current level of resilience and directly comparing it to the target level, allowing for the identification and mitigation of performance gaps by the community. Assuming that communities are working under limited resources available to improve their resilience, an important focus of this paper is on prioritizing performance gaps such that those with the greatest negative effect on the current level of resilience may be addressed with mitigation first...

view more

Progressive collapse analysis of an RC structure

The Structural Design of Tall and Special Buildings

Mehrdad Sasani, Jesse Kropelnicki

2008 Progressive collapse denotes a failure of a major portion of a structure that has been initiated by failure in a relatively small portion of the structure. One approach to evaluate progressive collapse of structures is to study the effects of instantaneous removal of a load‐bearing element such as a column. An experimental program is carried out to study the behavior of a 3/8 scaled model of a continuous perimeter beam in a reinforced concrete frame structure following the removal of a supporting column. A detailed finite element model (FEM) is developed and verified to capture the behavior of the beam subjected to large deformation. In order to avoid a detailed FEM of the whole building and to efficiently capture the system response, a three‐dimensional nonlinear model of the structure using beam–column and shell elements is also developed. The two models are integrated …

view more

Experimental and analytical progressive collapse evaluation of actual reinforced concrete structure

ACI Structural Journal

Mehrdad Sasani, Marlon Bazan, Serkan Sagiroglu

2007 One approach to evaluate progressive collapse of structures is to study the effects of instantaneous removal of a load-bearing element such as a column. In this paper, using experimental and analytical results, potential progressive collapse of an actual 10-story reinforced concrete (RC) structure following the explosion of an exterior column is evaluated. Development of Vierendeel action is identified as the dominant mechanism in redistribution of loads in this structure. The concrete modulus of rupture is identified as an important parameter in limiting the maximum recorded vertical deformation of the system to only 0.25 in.(6.4 mm). The changes in the directions of bending moments in the vicinity of the removed column and their effects such as potential reinforcing bar pullout (bond failure) are studied. Potential failure modes and their consequences are studied. Some shortcomings …

view more