UCLA Engineering: UCLA Engineer Fall 2004

Jonathan Stewart Receives Fulbright Award

By Marlys Amundson

Civil and environmental engineering associate professor Jonathan P. Stewart will travel to Italy early next year as part of the 2004-2005 Fulbright Scholar Program. Stewart will spend four months lecturing at the Department of Structural and Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Rome, La Sapienza. During his lectureship, Stewart intends to familiarize Italian colleagues and their graduate students with the state-of-the-art practices and technologies associated with Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering.

“Italy is a very competitive location for the Fulbright, but of all the European countries, Italy is perhaps the most seismically active, and there is a high level of seismic research being conducted,” noted Stewart. “For the most part, researchers in California have not had formal interactions with our colleagues in Italy, so this is a good opportunity for an exchange of ideas and information.”

Italy contains several regions of high seismicity that has given rise to an active local community of earthquake engineers and seismologists. However, collaboration between U.S. and Italian researchers has been sparse compared with interactions with researchers from other countries of high seismicity such as Japan, Taiwan and New Zealand. During his Fulbright, Stewart plans to share information about activities underway in California’s earthquake community with Italian researchers through lectures at La Sapienza and other universities outside of Rome.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Fulbright Program has been the U.S. government’s flagship program in international educational exchange since 1946. The U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program sends scholars and professionals each year to more than 140 countries, where they lecture or undertake research in a wide variety of academic and professional fields.