SEAS Welcomes Dr. Kim Roddis

The School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) is pleased to announce the arrival of our new Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering chairperson, Dr. W. M. Kim Roddis.

Dr. Roddis joined the SEAS faculty on August 1, 2004. She previously was a member of the faculty of the structural engineering group of the Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering Department at the University of Kansas (KU).

Dr. Roddis received each of her academic degrees (BS, MS, and Ph.D.) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a Fannie and John Hertz Fellow, as well as the recipient of an AISC fellowship and American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) O. H. Ammann Reseach Fellowship. She joined the KU faculty in 1988 and was the first woman ever to earn tenure in KU’s School of Engineering, as well as the first woman to earn the rank of full professor on KU’s engineering faculty. During her tenure there, she served as a senior administrative fellow and as the department’s associate chair.

A registered professional engineer, Dr. Roddis has design experience in heavy industrial and general commercial building design, as well as in bridge design. She is a structural engineer with varied teaching and research interests, which include: design, fabrication, and construction processes; structural applications of artificial intelligence and computer-aided design; web-enhanced teaching; fatigue and fracture in bridges; frame stability; and seismic steel connections. She is recognized nationally as an expert in distortion-induced fatigue of steel highway bridges and internationally as an expert on the application of artificial intelligence and advanced computing methods to civil engineering problem solving.

Dr. Roddis currently serves as the ASCE representative on the Board of Directors of the International Society of Computing in Civil and Structural Engineering. She is a fellow of ASCE and active at the national level in ASCE, AISC, and TRB. Awards she has received in the last 5 years include: AISC’s Special Achievement Award; KU’s Docking Scholar; and KU’s School of Engineering’s Miller Award for Service, Miller Faculty Development Award, and Bellows Fellow.