Michel Bruneau

SUNY Distinguished Professor Michel Bruneau is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and Emeritus Director of an NSF-funded Earthquake Engineering Center that focused on enhancing the disaster resilience of communities.  He has spent more than three decades developing engineering strategies to enhance the disaster resilience of infrastructure. His extensive body of research has been instrumental to the inclusion, in national and international standards, of specifications for multiple innovative structural systems, leading to implementation in countless structures worldwide. 

He has received more than 20 prestigious awards for this innovative work, including a lifetime achievement award. Dr. Bruneau has conducted numerous reconnaissance visits to disaster-stricken areas, is a member of many professional and technical code-writing committees, and has served on many expert peer review panels.

He is one of the most cited researchers in structural engineering and earthquake engineering.  He has authored or co-authored over 550 technical publications, including more than 180 referred journal papers, 250 papers in conference proceedings. Notably, he is the lead author of the 900-pages textbook “Ductile Design of Steel Structures,” used worldwide by structural engineers, and is the lead author of the 2003 seminal paper that has formulated a concept and expression of disaster resilience that today is at the foundation of most research on this topic. He also authored the highly praised book “The Blessings of Disaster: The Lessons That Catastrophes Teach Us and Why Our Future Depends on It” for a general (non-technical) audience, because an informed public is a necessary condition to achieve a resilient society.