Thigarajan Ganesh
CEE Hall of Distinction: 2022
Dr. Thiagarajan Ganesh is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and is a proud graduate of Louisiana State University with a Ph.D. from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1996. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Civil (1985) and Structural Engineering (1988) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India. Subsequently, he worked in the industry for several years prior to starting a Ph.D. at LSU. He had the pleasure of teaching at LSU full time till 2002, teaching several sophomore and junior level courses such as Statics, Strength of Materials and Dynamics to all engineering students in the College of Engineering. During his tenure at LSU, he was honored with several teaching awards such as the Chi Epsilon Teaching Award, the Tiger Athletic Foundation teaching award and the ASCE Student Chapter Outstanding Teaching Award.
Dr. Ganesh joined the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC) in 2002 as an Assistant Professor in Structural Engineering after spending a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. At UMKC he was awarded the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER award in 2008 for his work in blast behavior of concrete structures. The work led to the conduction of a worldwide blind prediction contest in this area through the American Concrete Institute (ACI). Two special publications resulted from the competition. A team led by Dr. Ganesh was awarded the First Place in the International E Defense Blind Analysis Contest in predicting the seismic behavior of a multi-story steel structure (3-Dimensional Analysis by Researchers Category) (2008) conducted by National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, Hyogo Earthquake Engineering Research Center, Japan. He has successfully completed projects in collaboration for Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) to develop cost effect bridge approach slabs and an innovative design of prestressed precast approach slabs. Both the designs were adopted by MoDOT for implementation. He is currently working on bridge load rating project for MoDOT. At UMKC he has been recognized for his research as a Faculty Scholar (2006) and the N.T. Veatch Award (2021) and several excellence in teaching award at the school level and the Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching award (2022).
Dr. Ganesh also has worked for over fifteen years in biomechanical testing in bone mechanotransduction, in studying how bone cells such as osteocytes respond to mechanical loading and their role in bone growth. The work has been funded by the Missouri Life Sciences Research Board, National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. Other areas of research include biomechanical testing of knees, elbows, and other tissue from cadaveric specimen to study the biomechanical properties. Work in this area has been funded by the Kansas City Consortium on Musculoskeletal Disease.
Ganesh currently serves as an Associate Editor in the American Society of Civil Engineers Structural Engineering Journal and Materials Journal. He has served in the Missouri chapter of ACI for several years culminating in being the chapter President. In recognition of the work in research and service in the field, he was elected to serve as the Chair of ACI Committees 447 (Finite Element Analysis of Reinforced Concrete Structures) and 370 (Blast and Impact Load Effects) for two terms in each committee. He is also a fellow of ACI.
