Mete Sozen

Mete Avni Sozen was a structural engineer who held the Kettelhut Distinguished Professorship of Structural Engineering at Purdue University in Indiana from 1992 until 2018. He studied at the Robert College School of Engineering in Istanbul, graduating in 1951, then took a master's degree in 1952 and a doctorate in 1957 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied the shear strength of prestressed concrete girders under Chester P. Siess and Nathan M. Newmark. He taught at Illinois from 1957 to 1992. In 1967, with Shunsuke Otani, Polat Gulkan and Norbert Nielsen, and with funding from the National Science Foundation and technical support from MTS Systems Corporation, he developed the first earthquake shaking simulators in the United States, housed at Illinois. He also worked on design codes for concrete structures, contributed to official studies of the Oklahoma City bombing and the Pentagon attack, and led a simulation of American Airlines Flight 11 striking the World Trade Center. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1977.