Eleven students from the Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture and Design schools of the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) won the grand prize for Best Seismic Performance at the 19th Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition held in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
The competition was held in conjunction with the 2022 National Conference of Earthquake Engineering (NCEE) organized by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States from 27 June to 1 July 2022. The EERI is a global leader in earthquake investigations and dissemination of earthquake risk reduction information.
The students of the PUCMM Engineering and Architecture students competed with those of world-renowned academies, such as Stanford, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford, Berkeley, New York University (NYU) and Cornell and won the highest weight category of the Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition.
The PUCMM team bested projects submitted by 42 participating universities from around the world to win the most important category of the international competition. “Imagine that an earthquake occurs and out of 40 buildings, the one that performed best was the one designed by the PUCMM team,” explained Ashley Morales, director of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering of La Madre y Maestra.
“To win this award means that the science we teach here is as valid as that which they learn there. We are preparing young people to be engineers of the world,” said the professor.
Ten women and one man made up the team, a particularity that aroused the interest of the participants in Utah. People were interested in learning more about the only team led by women.
The students awarded in this project were Sherlin Montero, Karla Medina, Brenda Rodríguez, Melanie Dickson, Anny De La Rosa, Rafaelina Liranzo, Ana Peña, Nathalia de León, Scarlet Sarraff, Camila Cruz and sole male engineering student, Isaac Moloon.
To participate in this event, the 19 to 21 year olds submitted a proposal in January 2022 that placed the Dominican team in the top nine out of 42 universities worldwide that applied. The proposal finally won the most important category in the 19th Annual Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition.
Other competition award winners were:
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania)
Cornell University (New York, USA)
Technical University of Civil Engineering (Bucharest, Romania)
Other award winners were:
Charles Richter Award for Spirit of the Competition: University of British Columbia (Canada)
Egor Popov Award for Structural Innovation: Oregon State University (USA)
Fan Favorite Poster: Universitas Indonesia
T-Shirt Design: University of California, San Diego (USA)
Best Communication Skills Ward: Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania)
Best Architecture Award: University of Toronto (Canada)
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PUCMM
Diario Libre
SLC
EERI
21 July 2022