The Grainger College of Engineering
Civil & Environmental Engineering

Yi-Kwei Wen

Yi-Kwei Wen
Yi-Kwei Wen
  • Professor Emeritus

Biography

Yi-Kwei Wen holds a B.S. (National Taiwan University 1965), M.S. (University of Western Ontario, Canada, 1968), and Ph.D. (Columbia University, New York City 1971), all in civil engineering. He has been on the faculty of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois since 1971, and promoted to Professor since 1981. He was Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, Japan in 1986, Visiting Professor at National Taiwan University in 1993, and Visiting Chair Professor at National Center for Research of Earthquake Engineering, Taiwan in 2001.

Dr. Wen has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in engineering modeling under uncertainty, introduction to structural dynamics, engineering decision and risk analysis, and probabilistic bases for structural loads and design. He is the author of the book Structural Load Modeling and Combination for Performance and Safety Evaluation (Elsevier,1990).

Dr. Wen is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Academy of Mechanics, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability, and the International Federation for Information Process. He has served as chairman on technical committees of these societies. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of probabilistic Mechanics, Journal of Structural Safety, Journal of Soil dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, and Journal of Computational Structural Engineering. He has served as associate editor for ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering and Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

In 1986 Dr. Wen was the recipient of the Walter Hubert Prize of ASCE for his research on structural reliability and nonlinear random vibration and in the same year the Moissieff Award of ASCE for a paper on load combination. In 1997 he was given the Research Prize of the International Association of Structural Safety and Reliability for his contribution in the advancement of reliability-based design and safety evaluation of structural systems. In 2002, he won the Raymond Reese Research Prize of ASCE for his paper on design loads for parking garages.

Research Statement

Dr. Wen has research interests in reliability analysis and reliability-based design, random vibration and applications to earthquake engineering, wind engineering, and offshore structures. He has edited or co-edited seven books, published over 60 papers in technical journals, over 120 papers in conference proceedings in the above areas.