Giuseppe Grandori

Biographic sketch

Giuseppe Grandori (1921-2011). Assistant professor in 1951. Associate professor in 1954. Full professor of Theory of Structures at Politecnico di Milano in 1961. Emeritus since 1996.

Honours and Awards

• Past President, now honorary member, of EAEE (European Association for Earthquake Engineering).
• Past President, now honorary member, of IAEE (International Association for Earthquake Engineering).
• Honorary member of AICAP (Associazione Italiana Cemento Armato e Precompresso).
• Member of Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere.
• Gold medal awarded by the President of the Italian Republic for special merits in Education, Culture and Art (1975).
• Gold medal awarded by the Municipality of Milan for special scientific merits and civic virtues (1980).

Scientific Interests

In the period 1951-1965 his main scientific interests were: Theory of elastic-plastic structures, Stability of structures, Structural dynamics - Since 1965 his activity was concentrated in the fields of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology.
He has been consulting for seismic design of several important structures, such as long-span bridges and nuclear power plants. He was responsible for the definition of the design earthquake to be used for the bridge across the Messina Straits, and for the study of seismic risk of the leaning Tower of Pisa.

Selected achievements in the field of Safety Engineering and Disaster Mitigation

• Theoretical proof and experimental confirmation that in an elastic-plastic solid, subject to contemporaneously increasing loads, the plastic volume may begin to decrease when the loading process exceeds a certain level (Ref. 13).
• A new attenuation law of macroseismic intensity with epicentral distance, with a better fitting to Italian data compared with traditional attenuation laws (Ref. 69).
• Many contributions to the probabilistic interpretation of short-term earthquake precursors. A compendium is in (Ref. 74).
• A rational approach to the choice of the acceptable level of risk for constructions in earthquake-prone areas (Ref. 53).
• A new approach to the falsification of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (Ref. 68).
• Many contributions to the quantitative analysis of uncertainties in the evaluation of seismic risk at a site (Ref. 78,79,80,81).