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By Peter Murphy

According to ASCE, The SEI Fellow grade distinguishes SEI members as leaders and mentors in the profession. This is the latest recognition Constantinou has earned from ASCE, one of the largest and the oldest national civil engineering societies. He was co-recipient of the ASCE Charles Pankow Award for Innovation in 2005, received the society’s Moisseiff Award and the Nathan N. Newmark Medal in 2015, and was elected fellow of ASCE in 2019.

Constantinou’s research interests focus on seismic protective systems, and he has authored or co-authored over 300 papers, books, book chapters and reports on the topic. He has made significant contributions in a myriad of areas, including the development, understanding and modeling of sliding seismic isolation systems; the understanding of lifetime behavior of elastomeric and sliding isolators; developing the concept of property modification factors for performing bounding analysis of structures with seismic protective systems; and several other high-impact domains. 

He continues to contribute to developing codes and specifications related to seismic protective systems, like ASCE Standard 7, a widely used civil engineering standard, and codes and standards associated with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program.

“This is another well-deserved recognition of Professor Constantinou’s longstanding international leadership in the field of structural engineering,” says Alan Rabideau, professor and chair of the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering.

The impact of his work is global. Constantinou, who is also a Samuel P. Capen Professor of Civil Engineering, has consulted on the analysis, design and inspection of over 100 structures with seismic protective systems in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, India and South America. Some of the notable structures he has contributed to include the Apple Campus in California, the Stanford University Hospital, the Loma Linda University Medical Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Acropolis Museum in Greece. 

Constantinou joined UB in 1987. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Patras in Greece in 2019, and the distinguished alumni award from his alma-mater Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2022.