Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR Peter R. Sparks is Associate Professor of Civil Engineering and Engi- neering Mechanics at Clemson University. He received a B.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering from Bristol University in l968 and a Ph.D. in Struc- tural Engineering from London University in l974. From l968 to l977 he was a Scientific Officer at the United Kingdom Building Research Estab- lishment, where he was responsible for research on the behavior of con- crete under fluctuating loads and on the experimental determination of dynamic characteristics of large structures. In l977 he moved to the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, first as a Visiting professor and then as Associate Professor. His research there was concerned mainly with the determination of wind loads on structures both from wind tunnel tests and full-scale measurements. He took up his present position in l982. His current areas of interest are structural performance under wind and earthquake loads, structural system identification from vib- ration measurements, and the development of structural systems to resist natural hazards. 42
