By Steve Tollefson, Educational Development -- Student Life
Posted April 14, 1999

Anil K. Chopra. Jane Scherr photo.

In the early 1990s, Anil K. Chopra, the Horace, Dorothy and Katherine Johnson Professor of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, realized that he was dissatisfied with the material available for his students. So he threw out 25 years of lecture notes.

"This was a liberating event," Chopra recalls. "I was free to start from scratch."

Out of this revitalization came a widely acclaimed textbook, "Dynamics of Structures: Theory and Applications to Earthquake Engineering." Chopra's students, not known for their lavish praise of textbooks in general, feel differently about this one. "The book is awesome ã I enjoyed reading it!" one student commented.

Dedication to student learning is evident in all aspects of Chopra's teaching. Beyond making a conceptually difficult subject accessible to students, "it is my goal to share with them the satisfaction of comprehending ã and the joy of resolving ã complex structural dynamics issues that arise in ensuring seismic safety," he says.

A widely respected authority on structural dynamics and earthquake engineering, Chopra received his BS from Banaras Hindu University, and his PhD from Berkeley. He joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1967.

(return to main Distinguished Teaching Awards page)

April 14 - 20 (Volume 27, Number 30)
Copyright 1999, The Regents of the University of California.
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