Home (MichelBruneau.com) › Engineering Profile
Michel Bruneau

Michel Bruneau

SUNY Distinguished Professor
Dept. of Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering
University at Buffalo

UB Civil Engineering  ·  SEESL Director 2018–2020
Google Scholar  ·  LinkedIn Profile  ·  LinkedIn Articles
Former Director (2003–2008) & Deputy Director (1998–2003) of MCEER

Biography

Michel Bruneau, Ph.D., P.Eng., is a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering at the University at Buffalo, 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. His body of research developing engineering strategies to enhance the resilience of infrastructure has been instrumental to the inclusion, in national and international standards, of specifications for multiple innovative structural systems. He has received more than 20 awards for his work, including the ASCE Ernest E. Howard Award and an AISC Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Bruneau has conducted numerous reconnaissance visits to disaster-stricken areas, is a member of AISC and CSA code-writing committees, and has served on many expert peer review panels. He has authored more than 600 publications and is one of the most cited researchers in structural engineering and earthquake engineering. He is also the lead author of the textbook Ductile Design of Steel Structures and 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. His most recent book, The Blessings of Disaster: The Lessons That Catastrophes Teach Us and Why Our Future Depends on It, offers the general public a truthful and effective journey through the world of disasters.

Education & Background

  • B.Sc. Civil Engineering, Université Laval, Québec, 1983
  • M.S. Structural Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, USA, 1984
  • Ph.D. Structural Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, USA, 1987 (with specialization in Earthquake Resistant Design)
  • Practical experience gained working for the design offices of Morrison Hershfield Limited, North York, Ontario, and Buckland and Taylor Ltd, North Vancouver, B.C.
  • Regularly providing consulting services to the industry.

Welcome to my web page. Feel free to browse.

Coordinates

Mail Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, 130 Ketter Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, 14260
Email bruneau [A*T] buffalo.edu  (address munging — replace A*T with @)
Phone (716) 645-3398  (but then again, I have voice mail…)
Fax (716) 645-3733

Fifteen Minutes of Fame…

I have no future as an actor… but, strangely, I am on YouTube!

Finding MCEER Legacy Web-Pages

MCEER

As a former MCEER Director, I sometimes receive enquiries from individuals searching for material that used to be posted on the MCEER website. That rich and diverse content was used and referenced by many educators, researchers, and practitioners from various disciplines, who have expressed disappointment at the loss of these valuable resources.

I have not been involved in the management of MCEER since 2008, and am therefore not involved in matters related to the current website content. However, I am pleased to report that most of the MCEER legacy web-pages can be found on the Internet Archive – WayBack Machine.

This website takes snapshots of various websites throughout the years, and it is fortunate that a fair amount of MCEER's former website has been archived there, periodically since 1998. Click on a year to view a calendar of days when the site has been archived in that given year. Click on a specific highlighted day to bring up what the website looked like at that particular point in time (at least, most of it apparently).

Note: To Students Emailing Their CVs

Most professors nowadays receive countless unsolicited emails from individuals who would like to participate in their research activities, either as interns, graduate students, post-doctoral students, or visiting professors. Feel free to forward such information, but note that, due to time constraints and the high volume of correspondence received, I am generally unable to acknowledge reception and/or reply to these letters (particularly if you email it to me three dozen times, which is very very very aggravating and automatically puts you on the "never, never, never accept" list).

Given that admission to our graduate program is on a competitive basis, all applications being reviewed by a departmental committee, it is recommended that prospective graduate students follow the directives of the Department of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering.