Professor Manolis Chatzis
Tutorial Fellow in Engineering Science
Associate Professor in Engineering Science
Manolis graduated from the National Technical University of Athens in 2007 with a Diploma in Civil Engineering and obtained an MSc from NTUA in Structural Engineering in 2008. Â He then joined Columbia University in the City of New York, where he completed his PhD in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in 2012, under the supervision of Professor Andrew Smyth, successfully defending his thesis “The Dynamics of Rigid Bodies on Moving Deformable Media”. He then continued in Columbia as a Post Doctoral Research Scientist working on “System Identification and data fusion”. He was appointed an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford in 2013.
Watch Manolis’s recent video on designing buildings for earthquakes on Oxford University’s Oxplore, ‘The Home of the Big Questions’.
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Research interests
Manolis’ work is focused in the field of Dynamic Systems and Earthquake Engineering. An important direction is to accurately model and quantify the risk for components that are not tied or bolted to their support medium, unlike what is typically done in Civil Engineering structures, and thus are allowed to slide, rock and twist when subjected to ground motions. This applies to both structural components as well as non-structural, such as seismically isolated buildings, museum artifacts, hospital equipment, electrical transformers, supercomputers or even household equipment.
A second direction of focus is that of System Identification and Observability of nonlinear structural systems. The goals of this research are to determine the required sensor setups that result in identifying the properties of a structure (Observability), to find suitable combinations of sensors that make the most of the capabilities of each instrument (Data Fusion) and finally to identify the properties of a structure using numerical algorithms (System Identification), which has important applications in determining the Reliability of our infrastructure. A special focus of this research is on the behavior of non-smooth systems, which typically correspond to physical problems involving damage, sliding or impacts.
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Publications
The list of publications can be viewed here.