SharonWood
Design and behavior of reinforced concrete structures; Infrastructure monitoring; Earthquake engineering
Bio
Sharon Wood is a professor in the Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. She was also the former dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering and former provost of The University of Texas at Austin.
Wood began her career in academia as an assistant professor and later, associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Following her time in Illinois, she spent one year as a visiting associate professor at the University of Washington before joining the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin as an associate professor, and later went on to become dean and then provost.
As dean, Wood has championed a new hands-on, project-based learning model. She has launched online master’s degree programs in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and new bachelor’s degree programs in computational engineering and environmental engineering, opened a 430,000-square-foot multidisciplinary engineering building on the UT campus and helped bring tens of thousands of K-12 students to campus for outreach events like the Cockrell School’s Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day.
Wood, who holds the Cockrell Family Chair in Engineering #14 and the Jack and Beverly Randall Dean’s Chair for Excellence in Engineering at UT, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and past president of the American Concrete Institute. She has been nationally recognized for her research on the earthquake response of reinforced structures and has served on federal advisory committees for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Educational Qualifications
Ph.D., Civil Engineering, University of Illinois, 1986
M.S., Civil Engineering, University of Illinois, 1983
B.S., Civil Engineering, University of Virginia, 1982
Select Awards & Honors
- Outstanding Projects and Leaders Award – American Society of Civil Engineers (2018)
- National Academy of Engineering member (2013)
- Academy of Engineering of Mexico member (2015)
- Outstanding Projects and Leaders (OPAL) Award – ASCE (2017)
- Henry L. Kennedy Award – American Concrete Institute (2006)
Related Websites
Ferguson Structural Engineering Laboratory
Center for Transportation Research
Select Publications