Department of

Civil and Environmental Engineering


STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING

 

Kavanagh Lecture - Biographical Sketch

The Eleventh Thomas C. Kavanagh Memorial Structural Engineering Lecture

April 1, 2004

7:30 pm

Applied Research Laboratory Auditorium

Stability Lessons from Experiments and Structural Failures

by

Dr. Joseph A. Yura
Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Joseph A. Yura holds the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering at theUniversity of Texas in Austin. He was born in Hazleton, Pa. and received his engineering education at Duke University (BSCE), Cornell University (MS in Structural Engineering) and Lehigh University (PhD in CE). He was elected to both Tau Beta Pi and Phi Beta Kappa at Duke University. After serving one year as Assistant Professor at Lehigh, he joined the faculty at UT Austin in 1966. He has industrial experience with the Bethlehem Steel Company Fabrication Division, Modjeski and Masters Consulting Engineers and Exxon Production Research Company. While at Modjeski and Masters, he worked on the design of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge across the Hudson River.

At Texas he has concentrated his teaching and research in structural engineering in the areas of steel design, stability, structural connections and offshore structures. He has been a contributing member of the Structural Stability Research Council, the Research Council on Structural Connections and ASCE. Yura has been given numerous awards for his teaching and research related to steel structures. In 1974 he received the T. R. Higgins Lectureship Award for his paper on design of columns in unbraced frames. He has also been awarded the Raymond C. Reese Research Prize and the Shortridge Hardesty Award from ASCE.

He has been a member of the AISC Specification Committee since 1972, is currently chairman of the Task Committee on Stability of AISC, and was the principal developer of the stability bracing provisions in the 2000 AISC-LRFD Specification. He is a co-author of a recent lecture series for practicing engineers on Bracing for Stability that has been given throughout the US, Canada and Mexico. He has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his work on bracing and stability. He is a registered professional engineer in Pennsylvania and Texas.