Guest Speaker
Professor W. M. Kim Roddis is Chair of The George Washington University's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. A registered professional engineer, Professor Roddis has 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.
Professor Roddis currently serves as the American Society of Civil Engineers (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, the American Institute of Steel Construction, and the Transportation Research Board.
Professor Roddis joined the GW 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). She was the first woman ever to earn tenure at KU's School of Engineering, as well as the first woman to earn the rank of full professor on KU's engineering faculty.
Professor Roddis earned each of her academic degrees (BS, MS, and Ph.D.) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a John and Fannie Hertz Fellow.