On Monday, April 14 legendary engineering entrepreneur Ashraf Habibullah, Founder, President and CEO of Computers and Structures, Inc. visited the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering for a day with the Department of Structural Engineering.
Beginning at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center with a top-to-bottom tour of the world’s largest high performance outdoor shake table, Ashraf learned how it is able to move in all six degrees of freedom, reproducing realistic earthquake ground motions including east to west, up and down, north to south, roll, pitch and yaw.
While, Ashraf and the Structural Engineering researchers were touring the underground facility that controls the shake table, the team actually experienced a real seismic event: a 5.2 magnitude earthquake occurred in San Diego county at 10:08 am PST, creating a rare opportunity and memorable experience for Ashraf while being introduced to earthquake engineering at UC San Diego!
After a visit to the top of the 10-story cold-formed steel building currently standing on the shake table, Ashraf went to the UC San Diego main campus to have lunch and talk with Department faculty spanning the aerospace, biological, civil, geotechnical, and mechanical application areas that together make Structural Engineering at the Jacobs School a leading innovator in education and research.
A highlight in Ashraf’s visit was the opportunity to speak with structural engineering students and then meet with groups of undergraduate and graduate students presenting their research, class projects, competition models, and laboratory projects. In his talk to the students, Ashraf recognized the significant and fundamental contribution structural engineering provides to society, and he emphasized the importance of “human engineering” as a vital complement to technical skill: “people like you because of how you make them feel good about themselves” he said, and he reminded us that people drive industrial innovation and success: “engineering is about people.”
