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Engineering professor receives Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award
June 5, 2024 - by Kim Delker
Madura Pathirage, an assistant professor in the Gerald May Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at UNM, has received the 2024 Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award.
The Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award is a national award that provides seed money for research by early-career faculty at ORAU member institutions. The award is intended to enrich the research and professional growth of new faculty, which often leads to additional funding from other sources.
The grant funds will support Pathirage in his research to assess the primary containment and the concrete biological shield structures of nuclear power plants under extreme dynamic events through analytical and numerical modeling.
Pathirage joined UNM in fall 2023. His areas of research focus on fracture mechanics and computational methods in solid mechanics.