2017 Americas Conference on Wind Engineering
May 21-24, 2017
Western University, Canada
Professor G.A. Kopp received a B.Sc.M.E. from the University of Manitoba in 1989, a M.Eng. from McMaster University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1995. Between 1995 and 1997 he held a NSERC Post-doctoral Fellowship in the Chemical Engineering Department at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. He returned to Canada in the summer of 1997 to an appointment of Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario and as a Senior Research Engineer at the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory. He was promoted to Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering in July 2007 (and has a cross-appointment in the Department of Mechanical & Materials Engineering). In January 2015 he was appointed Associate Dean (Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies) in the Faculty of Engineering.
Dr. Kopp’s expertise and research projects relate to mitigating damage to structures during extreme wind storms such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Details include model-scale wind tunnel and full-scale component test methods, field surveys of damage caused by tornadoes, building aerodynamics, wind effects on building component and cladding systems, tornado and thunderstorm winds, wind loads on solar arrays, the role of turbulence on wind loads, wind-borne debris, turbulent shear flows.
Dr. Kopp is currently Chair of the ASCE Environmental Wind Engineering Committee, a member of the Executive Board of the International Association of Wind Engineers, a member of the Executive Committee of the ASCE Technical Council of Wind Engineering, Past-President of the American Association for Wind Engineering, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics. He has been a Director of the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory since 2000. He is on Technical Advisory Committees for several wind engineering research programs at universities in the USA and Europe. He is a voting member of the ASCE 7 Wind Loads Subcommittee and of the Canadian Commission on Building and Fire Codes, Task Group for Climatic Loads. He held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Wind Engineering from 2001 – 2010 and was a Guest Professor of the Global Center of Excellence Program in wind engineering at Tokyo Polytechnic University in Japan from 2008 – 2013.
Professor, Department of the Built Environment, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands & Department of Civil Engineering, KU Leuven, Belgium
Bert Blocken is a full professor in Building Physics and Urban Physics at the Department of the Built Environment at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands and part-time full professor at the Department of Civil Engineering at KU Leuven (Leuven University) in Belgium. In 1998, he graduated from KU Leuven as Master in Civil Engineering (option Building Engineering). In 2004, he received his PhD at the same university. From 2004 to 2006, he held the post-doctoral fellowship of the Fund for Scientific Research in Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) for two years, one of which he spent at Concordia University in Montreal. In June 2006, Bert Blocken was appointed as assistant professor at the unit BPS. In January 2009, he was appointed as associate professor at the same unit and since April 2011, he is appointed as full professor and holds the position of Chair of Building Physics at the unit BPS.
His main areas of expertise are Urban Physics and Environmental Wind Engineering. His research focuses mainly on numerical modeling of micro-scale wind flow and the related processes in the urban environment, including urban microclimate, urban wind energy, natural ventilation, air pollutant dispersion, pedestrian wind comfort, etc. In addition, he has worked extensively in the field of Sports Aerodynamics, especially when applied to professional cycling.
He has published 126 papers on these topics in international journals with peer review and more than 200 papers on these topics in the proceedings of international conferences. He teaches the course “Urban Physics” in the bachelor track at TU/e and the courses “Heat & Moisture / CFD” and "Sports & Building Aerodynamics" in the master track, as well as the CFD module in the International Building Physics Summer Course and Urban Physics Schools (since 2004). He has received the 2011 Best Lecturer Award by the bachelor students at the Department of the Built Environment at TU/e and the 2016 Best PhD Supervision Team Award (together with dr. Hamid Montazeri) from the PhD Student Network at the same dept. of TU/e. He has also developed the first MOOC (= Massive Open Online Course) of TU/e, on the topic Sports & Building Aerodynamics, which is available on the Coursera platform.
He has been the Chair of the Scientific Committee of the 5th International Symposium on Computational Wind Engineering (CWE2010) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, US, in 2010 and the Chair of the Scientific Committee of the 13th International Conference on Wind Engineering (ICWE13) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2011. He is Editor of the ISI Journal Building & Environment (starting in Dec. 2016) and a member of the Editorial Board of the ISI Journals Journal of Wind Engineering & Industrial Aerodynamics, Building Simulation and Sports Engineering. He has received several national and international awards, including the 2013 Junior Award from the International Association of Wind Engineering, 6 Best Paper Awards from the leading ISI Journal Building & Environment (2009, 2011, 2012) and at International Conferences and a top-cited author award from the ISI Journal Atmospheric Environment (2010). Several of his papers and papers of his PhD students are top-cited papers in their respective journals. He is also a reviewer for more than 80 ISI journals ranging from Urban Physics to Sports Engineering.
He has supervised several PhD students, two of which received exceptional awards: PhD student Twan van Hooff was awarded the "PhD degree Cum Laude" from Eindhoven University in 2012 and PhD student Rubina Ramponi was awarded the "PhD degree Cum Laude" from Politecnico di Milano in 2014.
He is currently supervising a team of 3 postdoctoral fellows, 32 PhD students and 8 MSc students.
Peter Vickery
Principal Engineer, Applied Research Associates, Raleigh, NC, USA
Dr. Vickery received his B.E.Sc, M.E.Sc and Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 1981, 1984 and 1988, respectively. While working on his post graduate degrees, he served as a research engineer at the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory at the University of Western Ontario, performing boundary layer wind tunnel tests on high-rise buildings. After completing his doctoral degree, Dr. Vickery joined Applied Research Associates in Raleigh North Carolina, working with Drs. Tim Reinhold and Lawrence Twisdale.
Dr Vickery’s expertise and research projects relate to hurricane hazard modeling and wind induced building damage modeling. Working with Dr. Twisdale, in the mid-1990’s they developed the first ever full track probabilistic hurricane simulation model. The results of this model and continued improvements have been used to develop the hurricane wind speeds given in ASCE 7 since 1998. During the same time period, the first time stepping load and resistance model was developed to produce estimates of physical damage and financial loss to buildings subject to high winds. These models were used in the development of FEMA’s Hazus-MH® and ARA’s HurLoss hurricane loss estimation tools. The hurricane hazard and damage models have also been used in numerous benefit cost studies promoting mitigation and assessing loss reductions due to improvements in building codes.
Dr. Vickery is a Fellow of ASCE, and he has served on the ASCE 7 wind load subcommittee since 1996. He also serves on ASCE’s wind performance-based design ad-hoc committee. He formerly served on ASCE committees which developed the wind tunnel testing manual of practice and the wind tunnel testing standard (ASCE 49).
