ASCE has honored Sankaran Mahadevan, Ph.D., F.EMI, M.ASCE, with the 2023 George Winter Award for exemplary contributions to the research fields of risk and reliability analysis, uncertainty quantification, machine learning, system diagnosis/ prognosis, and decision-making under uncertainty.
Mahadevan has been a leading researcher in the fields of structural engineering and structural mechanics for almost 40 years. He has made many impactful research contributions, including those in the areas of reliability analysis, uncertainty quantification, surrogate modeling, and reliability analysis. In reliability analysis, he concentrated his efforts on system reliability and time-dependent reliability of multiphysics systems in the presence of epistemic uncertainty in models and data. His work on uncertainty quantification has impacted every topic in the discipline. He was also one of the early pioneers of adaptive surrogate modeling in reliability analysis, publishing a widely cited paper on the topic. Mahadevan has authored more than 600 technical publications, among them two books and more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles.
He is also an accomplished musician, having made important contributions to Carnatic music and given concerts worldwide.
The award is named for George Winter, world-renowned teacher and researcher at Cornell University, who died in 1982. The George Winter Award is intended as a recognition of the achievements of an active structural engineering researcher, educator, or practitioner who best typifies Dr. Winter’s humanistic approach to his profession – that is, an equal concern for matters technical and social, for art as well as science, for soul as well as intellect.