Viterbi Faculty Directory

Biography

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Dr. Erik A. Johnson is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Southern California. He earned B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988, 1993 and 1997, respectively, as well as a Certificate in Biblical Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1991. He was a visiting research assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame 1997-99. He joined the civil engineering faculty of the University of Southern California in August 1999. He previously served as the Associate Chair of the USC Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2007-17 (and interim chair in 2011); since 2017, he has served as Vice Dean for Academic Programs for the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Dr. Johnson was the recipient of a 2001 U.S. National Science Foundation "Early Faculty Career Development (CAREER) Award," the Junior Research Prize and Medal from the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability (2005), and an Outstanding Recent Alumnus Award (2003) and a Distinguished Alumni Award (2016) from the University of Illinois. He is a senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and a member of both the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Dr. Johnson has served as the Chair of the ASCE EMI Technical Committee on Structural Health Monitoring and Control, the Chair of the ASCE EMI Probabilistic Methods Committee, as an Associate Editor of the ASCE Journal of Engineering Mechanics and on the Board of Directors of the American Automatic Control Council.

Dr. Johnson's research interests include "smart" structures, control of structural vibration, controllable damping devices, monitoring structural health, random vibration, and computationally-efficient simulation algorithms for dynamical systems.