Ming Liu, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, a research structural engineer at Naval Facilities Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center (NAVFAC EXWC) in Port Hueneme, CA, has been named a Fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Liu’s expertise in civil engineering covers field testing and laboratory measurement with nondestructive testing (NDT) methods, forensic investigations for extreme events such as hurricanes, and civil and structural design in accordance with design codes. He has been heavily involved in research projects funded by the Federal Highway Administration, National Cooperative Highway Research Program, and National Science Foundation, among others. His technical role in federal service since 2009 has involved structural analysis and safety evaluation beyond the current design code requirements, including but not limited to risk analysis of concrete dams subjected to strong earthquakes, tsunami design loads for naval facilities, and structural design reviews on nuclear-safety-related structures under seismic loads.
Liu’s primary research areas are structural safety design and evaluation, structural reliability and optimization, life-cycle civil engineering, and dynamics of structures. His research achievements include time-variant performance of concrete structures, structural safety evaluation integrated with structural health monitoring data, risk acceptance criteria in structural design and safety evaluation, and resilience of deteriorating structural systems and infrastructure networks. His scientific contributions focus on risk-based structural design and safety evaluation: code requirements, standard development, and implementation.
He has been effectively influencing the current standard updating and new code development in such a way that the current engineering practice to assessment, repair, and rehabilitation of existing structures will be consistent with the reliability principles in the design code requirements for new structures. His current research interest focuses on risk-based structural safety evaluation and design with considerations of life-cycle costs and physical evidences from both experimental tests and computer simulations.
Liu served as an SEI-ASCE committee member of Task Group 3: Reliability Assessment of Structural Infrastructure Facilities and Risk-Based Decision Making from 2010 to 2016. He initiated and developed the survey questionnaires for the special project “Implementation of Risk-Based Structural Evaluation Methods: Best Practices and Development of Standards,” which was funded by the SEI TAD Executive Committee to prompt the implementation of risk-based structural design and evaluation. He was one of three primary organizers for the international workshop on the special project, which was held at ASCE Headquarters in September 2014.
He has authored or coauthored about 40 scientific publications, including technical committee documents, book chapters, journal articles, and conference papers. Currently he is the secretary of ACI 348 “Structural Reliability and Safety,” and is a voting member of ACI 444 “Structural Health Monitoring and Instrumentation” and ACI 562 “Evaluation, Repair, and Rehabilitation of Concrete Buildings.”
Liu received a B.Eng. in civil engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China (1988), an M.S. in civil engineering from Bradley University (1996), and a Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of Colorado–Boulder (2006). He has been a registered professional engineer in Colorado since 2001.
