Garrett Receives Thomas Lord Professorship

Carnegie Mellon University's James H. Garrett Jr. will be awarded the prestigious Thomas Lord Professorship of Civil and Environmental Engineering at a reception from 3 to 5 p.m., Friday, May 7 in the Posner Center on the Pittsburgh campus.

               
"I am grateful to be recognized by Carnegie Mellon with this professorship, and consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to work with such excellent colleagues and students in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and other departments at Carnegie Mellon. I have tremendously enjoyed being a faculty member here at Carnegie Mellon for almost 20 years," said Garrett, head of Carnegie Mellon's top-ranked Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

                
The Lord Professorship honors an educator whose work has had a profound impact on the university, his academic field and society.

                
A visionary, Garrett is co-founder of the Center for Sensed Critical Infrastructure Research (CenSCIR), a five-year-old research center developed to deliver "nervous systems" for critical infrastructure. Garrett and his colleagues envision infrastructure with various sensors that collect valuable data that can be used to make important decisions regarding infrastructure repairs and replacement.

           
Garrett also is recognized for his work in developing formal models of codes and standards, and for mobile hardware and software systems he has developed to support information collection and access during construction management and bridge inspection processes.

               
"This professorship is wonderful recognition of Jim's leadership as he continues to build and work with an innovative and multi-talented department of civil and environmental engineers in a discipline that is poised to help solve some of the world's most challenging problems," said Pradeep K. Khosla, the Philip and Marsha Dowd University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and dean of Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering.

               
Prior to becoming department head in 2006, Garrett served for six years as an associate dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering. He has been a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 1990.

               
Elected a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2009, Garrett has received numerous awards, including the 2007 Steven J. Fenves Award for Systems Research at Carnegie Mellon, the 2006 ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering Award and the 2006 ASCE Pittsburgh Section's Professor of the Year Award. He also has received three ASCE Best Paper awards from the ASCE structural, transportation and computing journals.  He currently serves as co-chief editor of the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering.

              
Garrett received his bachelor's degree (1982), master's degree (1983) and Ph.D. (1986) in civil engineering from Carnegie Mellon.