Rate My Professor Eric Williamson

Eric Williamson is Professor Emeritus in the Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, holder of the J. Hugh and Betty Liedtke Centennial Fellowship in Civil Engineering and the Phil M. Ferguson Professorship in Engineering. He currently holds the Class of ’53 Distinguished Chair in Civil Engineering and serves as a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Williamson received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996, an M.S. in Civil Engineering from the same university in 1992, and a B.S. in Architectural Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. Prior to his academic career at UT Austin, he served as a research engineer at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. A registered Professional Engineer in Texas, he has actively participated in national technical committees and held leadership roles in the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Concrete Institute.

Williamson’s research centers on the response of structures to blast and impact loading, progressive collapse, structural response modeling and simulation, static and dynamic stability, failure modeling, and damage mechanics. His work has significant impact in areas such as infrastructure materials engineering, mechanics, uncertainty and simulation in engineering, and structural engineering. In recognition of his contributions to the analysis and design of bridges subjected to blast loads, he was awarded the American Society of Civil Engineers Walter L. Huber Research Prize in 2009. He also received the Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Teaching Award in 2013 and the Society of American Military Engineers Bliss Medal in 2015. Prominent publications include “Beam element formulation and solution procedure for dynamic progressive collapse analysis” (Computers & Structures, 2004), “Static equivalency in progressive collapse alternate path analysis: Reducing conservatism while retaining structural integrity” (Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities, 2006), “Analysis and design of critical bridges subjected to blast loads” (Journal of Structural Engineering, 2005), “Blast-resistant highway bridges: Design and detailing guidelines” (Transportation Research Board, 2010), and “Performance of bridge columns subjected to blast loads. I: Experimental program” (Journal of Bridge Engineering, 2011).