Born in Montreal, Canada, new CCEE Assistant Professor Simon Laflamme has devoted the last several years to research in structural control. He even has a patent pending for an elastomeric skin that locates and diagnoses structural damage.
Laflamme earned both a bachelor of commerce with an emphasis in economics and finance, and a bachelor of engineering with an emphasis in civil engineering from McGill University. Laflamme later earned a master’s and doctoral degree in civil engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
At MIT, he published four journal papers in structural control and health monitoring research; spoke at four conferences in the U.S., Canada, and Japan; and gave three invited talks in Germany, Japan, and Ireland. His doctoral thesis featured the control of large-scale structures with large uncertainties, and his master’s thesis described an online learning algorithm for structural control using magnetorheological actuators.
In May 2011, Laflamme was awarded the Ernest A. Herzog Award from the Boston Society of Civil Engineers for his work on the patent-pending structural sensing skin. In August 2009, he and his team of fellow international graduate students won the research competition for the Asia-Pacific Summer School on Smart Technologies, held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They earned the highest combined score on structural monitoring field tests and oral presentations.