I received my Ph.D. in civil engineering in 2013 from UCLA, and worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Structural Engineering and the Center for Extreme Events Research (CEER) at UC San Diego until I joined Penn State in 2016. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at Penn State holding the L. Robert and Mary L. Kimball Professorship. My research is currently being funded by NSF, the DOD, Penn State, and private industry. It has been implemented into several large-scale commercial and government computational mechanics codes, such as LS-DYNA, SIERRA of Sandia National Labs, and NMAP used by the U.S. Army ERDC and Caterpillar Inc.