My research is in computational mechanics emphasizing advanced meshfree simulation methods for understanding and predicting structural failure due to man-made and natural disasters, to ultimately mitigate the loss of life and property due to these events. I research effective modeling techniques for the computationally challenging phenomena involved, including fracture, extreme deformations and loadings, and multiple physics (e.g., coupled deformations and temperatures). Another critical aspect of these problems is predicting the complex behavior of the materials used in built infrastructure. More recently, I have developed new methods for simulating damage evolution in microstructures, i.e., fracture on the sub-centimeter scale, for improved understanding of composite materials such as reinforced concrete consisting of several individual materials. At Penn State external funding has supported research advances in these two broad areas, including four industry projects on extreme deformations and loadings and five projects on simulating fracture in composite materials sponsored by the U.S. Army, the Missile Defense Agency, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). I have graduated two M.Sc. students and three Ph.D. students.My research of naturally stabilized nodal integration formulated under the framework of variational consistency (VC-NSNI) has enabled high accuracy, stability, and efficiency not previously possible in computationally challenging applications such as penetration/fragment-impact, blast-loaded structures, landslides, explosive welding, earth moving, and 3D printing. These methods have also allowed numerical investigation of complex phenomena, including shock wave propagation in solids under blast and impact loadings, shear band formation in landslides, and failure mechanisms in man-made disasters.These methods have been implemented into codes used by the DoD (US Army Corps of Engineers' NMAP, NMAP-Micro, and MEGA), DoE (Sandia National Laboratories' SIERRA), the commercial code LS-DYNA, as well as codes used in private industry (Case New Holland Industrial America LLC, and Karagozian & Case Inc.). I received my Ph.D. in civil engineering in 2013 from UCLA, and worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Structural Engineering and the Center for Extreme Events Research (CEER) at UC San Diego with JS Chen, until I joined Penn State in 2016. Recently, I received the NSF CAREER award, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022. I am now a Principal Scientist at Karagozian and Case Inc.