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Who we are

Marios Panagiotou, PhD, PE

Founder and Managing Partner

 Dr. Marios Panagiotou is the founder and managing partner of Adstran. His main occupation is Senior Consultant at Nabih Youssef Associates in Los Angeles. His background and experience includes high-end research, teaching, and engineering practice work in earthquake structural engineering with specialization in earthquake resilient (low-damage) design, advanced seismic analysis and design of RC structures as well as on ground motions characterization. He has co-authored 25 journal publications and numerous conference papers and research reports. He is member of the ACI 374 (performance-based design),  ACI 447 (finite element) and SEAOSC Seismology committees. He was member of the NIST-FEMA Functional Recovery Project Review Panel. He is also the founder of the Online School of Earthquake Resilient Design.  He was the primary researcher and author of the nonlinear truss model for RC walls, co-developer of the initial beam--truss model (BTM), and co-developer of the computational framework BTM in the program FE-Multiphys. He has co-authored most of the publications on the truss and BTM analysis of RC components and structures.

 

His engineering practice work, as NYA's member, focuses on the advanced seismic analysis and design of large, complex, and earthquake resilient structures including high-rise buildings, stadiums, and structures that use seismic isolation as well as on the advanced seismic assessment of existing RC and steel structures. Constructed projects highlights from his engineering practice include the Earthquake Resilient Design of the New Long Beach Civic Center  as well as of the Renovation of the Los Angeles Coliseum Stadium. He has also worked on numerous peer reviews of the performance-based seismic designs of high-rise buildings and seismically isolated structures as well as on the plan check of the Hollywood Park Sofi Stadium.

 

Between 2008 and 2015 he was an Assistant Professor of Structural Engineering at University of California, Berkeley (UCB) conducting research and teaching on the seismic analysis, design, and experimental testing of RC structures, as well as on earthquake resilient buildings and bridges that use isolation, rocking components and high-performance materials. As a PhD researcher, he was responsible for the seismic design, analysis, and shake-table testing of a full-scale 7-story building slice at the NEES@UCSD equipment site; this is the tallest structure ever tested on a shake table in U.S. In 2012, he received the ASCE Alfred Noble prize for a journal paper related to the 7-story building project. As UCB faculty, he led as principal investigator (PI) a 740K Caltrans funded research program which included large-scale shake table and soil box tests of rocking foundations,  and he was co-PI on three large-scale experimental programs on the seismic response of RC components and on earthquake resilient bridge columns (PEER funded). He has also taught graduate courses at UCLA and USC.

Rodolfo Alvarez, PhD

Founding External Collaborator 

Dr. Rodolfo Alvarez has been a founding external collaborator with Adstran as an independent consultant. He has been the software designer and code developer of the BTM Component. During his PhD studies at the University of California San Diego, his research was focused on enhancing practicing engineering-oriented methodologies for the numerical verification of the seismic response of RC structural walls including softening. As a result of this research, he has been the primary author of several publications on the BTM analysis and the development of tools (graphic user interfaces and frameworks) for its application.

 

The main occupation of Dr. Alvarez is structural design. Since 2004, he has participated in the development of projects of dozens of commercial and industrial steel buildings constructed mainly in central and northern Mexico. Currently, he works as Design Manager for MM-Engineers in Mexicali B.C., where he has extended his expertise to the structural design of mid and high-rise buildings.

 

Dr. Alvarez was Adjunct Professor of Design of RC Structures at the University Autonomous of Baja California (UABC) between 2007 to 2014, and currently he teaches Design of Steel Structures at the same university. Also, he collaborates with the Mexican Society of Earthquake Engineering (SMIS) in the development of the Model Building Code for the Seismic Design, been part of the committee of Analysis Criteria.

Yannis (Ioannis) Koutromanos, PhD

External Collaborator 

Yannis (Ioannis) Koutromanos, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is the creator of the finite element program FE-Multiphys,  which is the basis of the BTM Component, and he has co-authored many of the BTM publicationsHis research primarily focuses on the analytical simulation of structural components and systems under extreme events, with an emphasis on reinforced concrete, masonry and steel structures under earthquake loading. He has authored and co-authored research papers and reports on finite element analysis (element formulations, constitutive models, solution algorithms, verification and validation of modeling schemes). He is also the author of the textbook “Fundamentals of Finite element Analysis – Linear Finite Element Analysis” (Wiley 2018). He is a voting member of the joint ACI/ASCE Committee 447, Finite Element Analysis of Reinforced Concrete Structures. 

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