Pramodit Adhikari, a Ph.D. student in the Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, has received the Third Place Award in the prestigious Objective Resilience Student Paper/Presentation Competition at the 2026 ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) Conference, held at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Adhikari is advised by Dr. Milad Roohi, Assistant Professor and Director of the Smart Resilient Infrastructure and Urban Systems (SiRIUS) Lab.
Developing Performance-Based Tornado Design
Adhikari’s award-winning research is titled "Field-Calibrated Reliability and Resilience Framework for Tornado Design of Residential Buildings."
Tornadoes pose severe risks to residential communities, yet current design codes for wood-framed structures lack field-calibrated probabilistic metrics. Adhikari’s work addresses this gap by developing a robust, field-calibrated reliability and resilience framework. The methodology integrates real-world reconnaissance data to calibrate structural performance models under extreme wind hazards, ultimately translating physical damage predictions into actionable community-level resilience metrics for decision-makers.
A Highly Competitive Selection Process
Chaired by Dr. Wanting (Lisa) Wang, Ph.D., P.E., the competition was exceptionally rigorous this year. To ensure an objective and fair review, 15 submissions from across the nation were fully anonymized and evaluated by an eight-member expert judging panel. Utilizing a Z-score standardization methodology, the panel selected just five national finalists to present in the final session at the EMI 2026 conference.
Adhikari represented UNL in the finals alongside students from the University of Notre Dame, the University of Southern California, Seoul National University, and the University of Miami. The official list of winners is published on the ASCE EMI Student Competition website.
