Teaching & Outreach
Our ultimate teaching and outreach goal is to prepare students for their future careers in practice and academia through close interactions and mentorship, allowing them to further develop their professional and scholarship aptitude in engineering.
Course Offerings
Outreach Activities
Prof. Shafei has taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate structural engineering courses, focusing on concrete design, structural analysis and mechanics of materials.
Bridge Design
Catalog description: Bridge design in structural steel and reinforced concrete. Application of AASHTO Bridge Design Specifications. Analysis techniques for complex structures. Preliminary designs include investigating alternative structural systems and materials. Final designs include preparation of design calculations and sketches.
Concrete Design II
Catalog description: Advanced topics in reinforced concrete analysis and design. Moment-curvature and load-deflection behavior. Design of reinforced concrete long columns, two-way floor slabs, and isolated and combined footings. Design and behavior considerations for torsion, biaxial bending, and structural joints. Strut-and-tie modeling.
Concrete Design I
Catalog description: ACI analysis and design of beams (singly reinforced, doubly reinforced, and T-section), one-way slabs, short columns, and isolated footings. Analysis and design for shear, flexure, axial force, and deflections. Bond, anchorage, and development of reinforcement. Application of the ACI shear and moment coefficients.
Structural Analysis
Catalog description: Loads, shear, moment, and deflected shape diagrams for beams and framed structures. Deformation calculations. Approximate methods. Application of consistent deformation methods to frames and continuous beams. Application of displacement methods to continuous beams and frames. Influence lines for determinate and indeterminate beams using Muller-Breslau principle. Computer applications to analyze beams and frames. Validation of computer results.
Advanced Topics in Reinforced Concrete Design
Catalog description: Design of various types of reinforced concrete systems including one- and two-way slabs, continuous beams, building frames, and beam-column joints. Moment-curvature analysis of reinforced concrete sections, moment redistribution of continuous systems, and strut-and-tie modeling techniques are discussed.
Mechanics of Materials (and Laboratory)
Plane stress, plane strain, stress-strain relationships, and elements of material behavior. Application of stress and deformation analysis to members subject to centric, torsional, flexural, and combined loadings. Elementary considerations of theories of failure, buckling. Analysis and design of structural members subjected to axial loads, torsion and bending, deflection of beams, behavior of columns and transformation of stress and strain.
Outreach Activities
Our research group strives to contribute to the education and training of a diverse group of students, particularly to facilitate the participation of underrepresented and economically disadvantaged students in STEM fields. In pursuit of broadening participation and creating unique educational, mentoring, and outreach opportunities for the nation’s future workforce, we have been working with various institutions on campus, including:
