ASCE has honored Hui Li, Ph.D., with the 2021 George W. Housner Structural Control and Monitoring Medal for pioneering research in the development and implementation of structural monitoring and control systems in large-scale structures, as well as for her commitment to developing innovative education programs for students.
Li has substantially impacted the field of smart structures technology in numerous ways. She has made seminal contributions to the area of structural health monitoring (SHM), and was the first to propose data science and engineering in that field. She also developed a series of machine-learning-based (ML-based) condition assessment approaches, which is a completely new approach enabling a wealth of monitoring data to be used. She has authored a book, Theory of Data Science and Engineering for SHM, and the proposed algorithms and approaches contained there have been applied to evaluate the conditions and identify damage for more than 70 large bridges and buildings, e.g., the Hangzhou Bay Bridge, the Jiashao Bridge, and the National Aquatics Center.
She extended her research on SHM to the wind response of long-span bridges and is conducting cutting-edge studies in ML-based wind engineering. Li was the first to propose the general solution of partial/ordinary differential equations (PDE/ODE) using reinforced learning algorithms, ML-based anisotropy turbulence models, and ML-based prediction models for the flow field pressure on bluff bodies, all of which are very fundamental theories in wind engineering.
Li is a forerunner in research of self-sensing concrete using nanomaterial additives and was the first to find the crystallization of C-S-H (main gel in concrete) on the surface of nano-TiO2 and graphene. Her five papers on the topic have been cited 2,276 times in total.
The George W. Housner Structural and Monitoring Medal recognizes outstanding research contributions to the broad field of structural control and health monitoring.
