Jamie Padgett, Stanley C. Moore Professor and Department Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, has been announced as one of two 2025 J.M. Ko Award Laureates.
The J.M. Ko Award recognizes and promotes exceptional young researchers from around the world who have made outstanding contributions of high originality and lasting importance to the science and technology of structural engineering.
Named after Professor J.M. Ko (Jan-Ming Ko), the first Chair Professor of Structural Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the founding editor-in-chief of the international journal Advances in Structural Engineering, the biennial award honors his remarkable legacy as a scholar, teacher and mentor to young people in structural engineering. It recognizes researchers who follow in his footsteps.
“It is a true honor to receive this award in the name of Professor Ko, whose contributions have had a lasting impact on the structural engineering community, and to join such a distinguished group of new and recent awardees,” said Padgett. “I deeply appreciate the spirit of exchange and enthusiasm for advancing the frontiers of our field that underpin this award.”
Padgett is a structural engineer whose research examines how major infrastructure— such as bridges and oil storage tanks—perform when exposed to multiple threats, including earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, aging and wear over time. She was selected for this award for her significant contributions to developing risk assessment tools that help engineers better understand and strengthen the resilience of these structures. Her work provides a clearer picture of how infrastructure is likely to perform during disasters, supporting better planning, preparation, and response.
Padgett has an extensive record of research publications, impact, and service to the community, solidifying her reputation as a leader in risk, reliability and resilience research. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) and the founding chair of SEI’s technical committee on Multiple Hazard Mitigation. Among other advisory and professional service roles, Padgett serves on editorial boards for journals including the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering, Structural Safety, and Reliability Engineering and System Safety, and serves on the Executive Board of the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability (IASSAR).
Padgett also leads several national disaster mitigation initiatives. These include the NIST Centre of Excellence for Risk-based Community Resilience Planning, which has produced an open, community-scale resilience modeling environment and testbeds in partner communities; the National Science Foundation’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) program to create DesignSafe, a cyberinfrastructure (online platform?) that provides the tools, data, and computing resources needed to accelerate discovery and enhance reproducibility across the natural hazards engineering community; and the recently-launched Consortium for Enhancing Resilience and Catastrophe Modeling (CERCat), a national hub that brings together university researchers with experts from the insurance, reinsurance, and engineering consulting sectors.
Her work is driven by a commitment to making large infrastructure systems more resilient and to ensuring that research tools and findings are more accessible to a broader community. By connecting academic research with real-world industry needs, her efforts have helped advance faster, more transparent, and more reliable approaches to catastrophe modeling.
As a J.M Ko Award Laureate, Padgett will receive a certificate, a medal and a cash award. In addition, she will be invited to visit The Hong Kong Polytechnic University to deliver a J.M. Ko Distinguished Lecture in Hong Kong or a city in the Greater Bay Area.