Professor John Brigham

John Brigham received a BE from Vanderbilt University and a MS and PhD from Cornell University.  He joined the University of Pittsburgh as an Assistant Professor in 2008, and was later promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Bioengineering.  John joined the Department of Engineering at Durham University as an Associate Professor in Applied Mechanics in 2016 and was promoted to a Full Professor in Engineering in 2019.  John was subsequently appointed as a Deputy Executive Dean for the Faculty of Science overseeing the 8 Departments of Science and Engineering at Durham, but decided to return to the University of Pittsburgh in the Fall of 2020.  Focusing on computational mechanics and inverse problems, John’s research group is actively involved in a number of diverse projects, including kinematic analysis of the heart for improved diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, novel design concepts and optimal design strategies for smart material morphing structures, and efficient and accurate quantitative nondestructive evaluation algorithms.  He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and abstracts, and his research team has been funded by a range of state, federal, and commercial entities, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy.  In recognition of his research accomplishments, John was elected as a Fellow of the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute in 2023.