Mete Sözen

Mete Avni Sözen (22 May 1930 – 5 April 2018) was Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, United States from 1992 to 2018.

Academic career Sözen earned his undergraduate education at the Robert College School of Engineering in Istanbul (1951), and his master's (1952) and doctoral degrees (1957) from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He earned his Ph.D. under the direction of Chester P. Siess and Nathan M. Newmark performing experimental studies to develop theories governing the shear strength of prestressed concrete girders. He then began his academic career at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he served on the faculty from 1957 through 1992.

The following students completed their Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Mete Sözen:

Earthquake engineering With funding from the National Science Foundation and technical support from MTS Systems Corporation Sözen, Shunsuke Otani, Polat Gulkan, and Norbert Nielsen developed the first earthquake shaking simulators in the United States in 1967, which was housed at University of Illinois.

Other contributions Besides his academic interest in the development of design codes for concrete structures, Sözen was notable for his contributions to the official post 9/11–government studies of terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing, and The Pentagon. Sözen also led a team that created an engineering simulation of American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The computer–generated visualizations were made entirely from the simulation data.

In 1977, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.