In the wake of the immense disaster caused by the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, the lecture focuses on structural performance and its vulnerabilities under the impact of seismic forces. The lecture aims to inform architectural students about the effects of earthquakes, the damages they can cause, and the design methods that can reduce the losses.

Biography:

Prof. Dr. H. Polat Gülkan is a structural engineer and an academician who has an international reputation in earthquake and seismic design studies. He graduated from the Department of Civil Engineering at METU. Then, he received his M.Sc. degree and Ph.D. from University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign. He has worked at Middle East Technical University for many years. Then, from 2017 to 2019, He has joined Bilkent University Department of Architecture as a part-time instructor. Currently, he is a faculty member at Başkent University at the Department of Civil Engineering. He has published extensively on disaster engineering and he has earned a global recognition in earthquake engineering. Recently, Dr. Gülkan has been accepted as a member of National Academy of Engineering – a very prestigious international organization that only accepts superior achievements of engineering.