Ertugrul Taciroglu

Ertugrul Taciroglu earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1998. After a stint at the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (UIUC) as a postdoctoral researcher, he joined the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department at UCLA in 2001. At UCLA, he served as department chair from 2018 to 2024.  His research interests span the disciplines of computational science and natural hazard risk assessment & resilience engineering. He is currently conducting projects on regional scale assessment of risks to the built environment due to wildfires, earthquakes, and hurricanes for a variety of federal (NSF, DOE), state (CADOC, CALTRANS), local (LA City, LADWP) agencies, and private companies. Dr. Taciroglu is the recipient of a 2006 National Science Foundation CAREER award, and the 2011 Walter Huber Prize of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He was elected a Fellow of the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) in 2015 and has served on its Board of Governors during 2020-2025. Taciroglu is the Chief Editor of ASCE Open: The Multi-disciplinary Journal of Civil Engineering, and serves on the Editorial Boards of several journals, such as Earthquake Spectra and Structural Control & Health Monitoring.