Joseph Main is a Research Structural Engineer in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He joined the NIST staff in 2005 as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associate. After completing his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 2002, he held research appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in the Weapons and Materials Research Directorate at the US Army Research Laboratory, and he was a visiting researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark in the fall of 2003.

Dr. Main’s primary research interests relate to the response of structures to dynamic loads, with particular interests in wind loading, blast loading, and the use of energy-absorbing materials and devices to mitigate dynamic response. His doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University utilized full-scale measurements in conjunction with analytical modeling to examine the problem of wind-induced cable vibrations on cable-stayed bridges and the mitigation of these vibrations using supplemental dampers. Subsequently, he showed that one of the key results from these analytical studies of cable damping – the existence of a “universal” form of approximation, suitable for use in design – could be extended to a general type of linear structure with several viscous dampers. This result holds promise to facilitate optimal placement and tuning of supplemental dampers in structures. At the Army Research Laboratory, Dr. Main worked on computational modeling of the response of composite plates to air blast loading and investigated the role of shock wave propagation in the core of cellular metal sandwich plates in mitigating – or potentially enhancing – the incident blast pressure..

Dr. Main’s postdoctoral research at NIST focused primarily on wind loading on low-rise buildings using the database-assisted design approach, in which aerodynamic and climatalogical databases are used directly in the analysis and design of structures for wind loads. He developed procedures to automate the handling of large aerodynamic databases in structural analysis and to enable interpolation for cases in which aerodynamic data corresponding to the dimensions of the structure of interest are unavailable. These results have been implemented in a publicly available software package called windPRESSURE. Currently, Dr. Main’s primary research focus is on computational modeling aimed at assessing structural vulnerability to disproportionate progressive collapse..

More information, including links to publications and software, can be obtained from Joe Main's personal webpage.

Joseph A. Main

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