Year 2012

• During March 29~31, Dr. Shao and Chelsea Griffith attended American Society of Civil Engineer’s Structures Congress in Chicago, Illinois. Pictured is Chelsea Griffith with their poster titled “Hybrid Testing in NEESR Projects.”

• On March 23, a student of the Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center, Timothy Oh, presented his research entitled “The Effects of Damping on a Soft Story Construction in Case of Seismic Activity” at Southwest Michigan Science and Engineering Fair. His project included shake table tests at LESS to characterize a woodframe structure’s (pictured below) seismic behavior with and without damping.

• Chelsea Griffith was chosen by the National Science Foundation to participate in the East Asia Pacific Summer Institute in Taipei, Taiwan. She will spend June-August conducting research at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering under Dr. Keh-Chyuan Tsai.
• This summer, Dr. Shao and Chelsea Griffith will travel to the University of Alabama to conduct large scale hybrid tests of a wood shear wall assembly.

Outreach Activities

• On May 14, 7th grade students from Kalamazoo Christian School visited the LESS.  They were divided into small groups and created structures out of spaghetti noodles and marshmallows.  Their structures were then tested using the shake table (pictured below).

                                                                     

Year 2011

• Dr. Shao gave a presentation named "Benchmark study and future development of Real time hybrid simulation" at the Advances in Real-Time Hybrid Simulation Workshop on October 10, 2011 at the Lehigh University NEES Facility. During the presentation she introduced the versatile hybrid testing system developed at LESS.

• Dr. Shao is awarded the 2011 Outstanding New Researcher by the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences,Western Michigan University.

• During July 10~15, Dr. Shao attended the Excellence in Civil Engineering Education Teaching (ExCEEd) Workshop at University of Texas at Tyler. This workshop was organized by American Society of Civil Engineers. By completing this workshop, Dr. Shao became an ExCEEd 2011 Teaching Fellow.  The picture below shows Dr. Shao with her team members and mentors at the graduation ceremony.

• During June 8~11, Dr. Shao and Griffin Enyart attended the Quake Summit 2011 (NEES and MCEER annual meeting) held in Buffalo, NY. The left picture shows Griffin in front of his poster "Developing a versatile hybrid testing system for seismic evaluation." The right picture shows Dr. Shao giving a presentation on "NEES-Soft  hybrid testing at NEES@Buffalo." 

• On May 11, Chee Kian Teng conducted a field test of a skewed steel girder bridge using wireless sensor networks. Dynamic vibration of the bridge subject to traffic load was recorded and will be analyzed using modern structural health monitoring schemes. The picture below shows Chee Kian installing wireless sensors on the steel bridge girder.                                                                                                                                    

• On May 10, Griffin Enyart successfully defensed his thesis entitled "Development of a versatile hybrid testing system for seismic evaluation of structural systems."  Congratulations to Griffin!

                                               

• Congratulations to Lusanni Acosta and John Sendor!  Lusanni and John are both Junior students in the Department of Civil and Construction Engineering. They recently won Undergraduate Research Excellence Awards from the Office of the Vice President for Research and will conduct research in the LESS with Dr. Shao during summer session (I), 2011.

•  The NEESSoft project performed by LESS with other four universities are reported by the Western Michigan University Newsletter Prism for academic affairs in the issue of March, 2011 (page 15).                                                           

• On March 25, 2011, two high school students Kelsey Wiers (left) and Annalin Davis (middle) from Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center presented their research project on "The Effect of Varying Mass and Stiffness on a Structure's Displacement, Velocity, and Acceleration During an Earthquake" at Southwest Michigan Science and Engineering Fair. They conducted a series of shake table tests at the LESS to verify the effect of mass and stiffness on structure’s response.                                                                                                                                                                                      

• The NSF funded George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) project on Seismic Risk Reduction for Soft-Story Woodframe Buildings (NEESsoft) is reported in the WMU College for Engineering and Applied Science newsletter published on March 1, 2011.

• Dr. Shao attended the Hybrid Simulation Workshop held by NEES@Berkeley equipment site on February 24~24, 2011.

• On November 18, 2011, 18 students and 2 chaperones from Mattawan Middle School visited LEES. They saw the demonstration of the shake table experiment. Also, the LESS member, Chelsea Griffith made a presentation which was about what civil engineering is and how many subjects it includes.

• On August 30, LESS, as one of the featured engineering laboratories in the WMU’s “Passport to Success,” welcomed incoming first-year students.  Almost 400 students worked together as teams to build structures using spaghetti and marshmallows (pictured left). Structures were then subjected to seismic tests in a shake table demonstration (pictured right).

                                 

• On May 12 and May 15, 7th grade students from Kalamazoo Christian School and 7th/8th grades students from the Gagie School visited the LESS to see the demonstration of the shake table test. They also built their own specimen for seismic testing using the lab facility.  A total of 130 students visited lab. The pictures below shows LESS member Chelsea Griffith interacting with the students.

Year 2010

• On December 2, 2010, 30 11th and 12th grade students from Olivet Community School visited the LESS.

• On November 12 and 16, 2010, a total of 100 students from the Gagie School (in seven groups) visited the LESS and watched the demonstration of a shake table test presented by LESS member Griffin Enyart.