Rate My Professor Claudia Marin

Claudia Marin, Ph.D., P.E., is a Professor and Graduate Student Director in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Howard University in Washington, DC. She earned a Ph.D. in Structural and Earthquake Engineering in 2007 and an M.S. in Structural and Computational Mechanics in 2008 from the State University of New York at Buffalo, along with a B.S. in Civil Engineering in 1993 from Universidad de Medellin, Colombia. A registered Professional Engineer in Virginia, Maryland, New York, Arkansas, and the District of Columbia, she accumulated more than seven years of experience as a professional structural engineer before joining the faculty at Howard University. Marin serves as Interim Director of the Research and Education for Promoting Safety (REPS) University Transportation Center and Principal Investigator of the Howard University Structural Simulation Laboratory. She is also the founder and advisor of the Engineering Ambassador Program since 2011, which engages undergraduate engineering students in K-12 STEM outreach to enhance soft skills, self-efficacy, and academic achievement.

Marin's primary research interests encompass computational mechanics, experimental evaluation of large-scale structural and nonstructural components, and structural health monitoring. Her work centers on developing protective systems to improve the performance of bridges, buildings, and their contents under seismic and other extreme loads, with contributions to large-scale experimental testing and field monitoring of built structures. The National Science Foundation has supported her research through grants, including the prestigious CAREER award from 2012 to 2019 and a $760,000 Convergence Accelerator award in 2020, enabling independent, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary programs. Key publications include "Energy dissipation enhancement of wire rope isolators" (2024), "Convolutional Neural Network Approach for Vibration-Based Damage State Prediction in a Reinforced Concrete Building" (2024), "Acceleration-to-displacement Conversion as a Single Time-domain Convolution Operation" (2023), and "Effects of Isolator Modeling on the Predicted Responses of an HDR Base-isolated Building" (2023). Among her honors are the Fulbright Scholar award (2000-2002), NSF ENHANCE Fellow (2013-2015), CEACS CETLA Fellow (2013-2014), and Best Paper Presentation at the 6th AAWE Workshop (2021). She advises the ASCE Howard University Chapter and directs graduate studies in Civil and Environmental Engineering.