It started as an ordinary day in Mexico City. For the young woman giving birth, though, it was already unforgettable. Soon enough, it would be memorable for everyone else, as a mild earthquake rumbled through the city. Jacobo Bielak, born that day, would not learn about his turbulent birthday for years.
As a senior in college, Bielak picked--by chance--a popular civil engineering professor to be his thesis advisor. The professor surprised him by handing him a book on earthquakes. Apparently, his new advisor was a respected earthquake expert. Bielak’s family told him what happened when he was born. As Bielak says, "The most important things in life are usually serendipity."
He completed his thesis and decided to follow in his advisor's footsteps. He analyzed, from an engineering viewpoint, how earthquakes impact structures. But as time went on, Bielak felt he needed to know more about earthquakes themselves and spent more than a decade studying the earth and its movements. "The relationship between the ground motion and the structure is crucial," he explains.
To continue his research, Bielak--a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon--was recently awarded a $1.6 million National Science Foundation PetaApps grant. He and his team of experts plan to develop "unprecedented" three-dimensional simulations that will model the ground movements of incoming earthquakes and show their impact on entire city regions. Bielak expects that his findings will be useful in reducing seismic risk for urban areas prone to earthquakes, such as his birthplace, Mexico City, a region he colorfully compares to a "bowl of Jell-O." --Melissa Silmore (TPR’85)
