Mete A. Sozen, S.E. (IL) (deceased), a graduate of Bogazici University (Istanbul) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was the Kettelhut Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. He taught courses on reinforced concrete and earthquake-resistant design. He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He was an honorary member of the Turkish Society for Engineers and Scientists, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Concrete Institute, the Architectural Institute of Japan, and the International Association for Earthquake Engineering. Dr. Sozen had been granted honorary degrees by Bogazici University (Turkey), Janus Pannonius University (Hungary), and the Tbilisi Technical University (Georgia). He was included in the Applied Technology Council and the Engineering News-Record lists of the top ten seismic engineers of the 20th century. Dr. Sozen had worked as a consultant with the Veterans Administration, the Department of State, Bechtel, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Consumers Power Co., Electric Power Research Institute, ERICO, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, SANDIA National Laboratories, U.S. Army Engineering R & D Center in Vicksburg, WJE Engineers, and Westinghouse Savannah River Site. He had also worked on design and evaluation of concrete dams with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and Southern California Edison. Toshikatsu Ichinose completed his undergraduate education in architectural engineering at Nagoya Institute of Technology and earned graduate degrees at the University of Tokyo. In 1982, he returned to Nagoya Institute of Technology (N.I.T.), where he taught structural mechanics and reinforced concrete. After retiring from N.I.T. Dr. Ichinose taught at Meijo University. Dr. Ichinose chaired the committee in charge of RC building code of the Architectural Institute of Japan for nearly 20 years. He is proud to also be a coauthor of Understanding Structures (CRC Press, 2008). Santiago Pujol is from Medellín, Colombia, where he was first exposed to the reinforced concrete industry by his father, an architect who designed and directed the construction of a number of residential and commercial buildings in the city. He completed his undergraduate education in civil engineering at the School of Mines at the National University of Colombia in 1996. At the time, the School of Mines had a five-year undergraduate program designed after European academic models. Damage caused by earthquakes in Colombia motivated him to earn an MS and PhD from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Dr. Pujol worked with a forensic firm in San Francisco, California, from 2002 to 2005. During that time, he traveled to Japan and started lasting collaborations with Japanese engineers whose wisdom and attention to proportions and aesthetics still influence his views. From 2005 to 2020, he taught and did research at Purdue University. He currently works at the University of Canterbury (U.C.), Christchurch, New Zealand. The move to U.C. was motivated in part by the Canterbury Earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 which, in his view, demonstrated the urgent need for more robust buildings to cope with uncertainties associated with earthquake hazards.
