Michael D. Shields Associate Professor Dept. of Civil Engineering Dept. of Materials Science & Engineering (Secondary Appointment) Johns Hopkins University michael.shields@jhu.edu

Education: B.S. - Physics, Loyola University Chicago B.S. - Civil Engineering, Columbia University M.S. - Civil Engineering, Columbia University M.Phil. - Civil Engineering, Columbia University Ph.D. - Civil Engineering, Columbia University

Dr. Shields is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Shields received dual bachelors degrees in Physics from Loyola University Chicago and Civil Engineering from Columbia University in 2006. He completed his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University in 2010. After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Shields worked as an NSF/ASEE Corporate Research Postdoctoral Fellow and then Research Engineer in the Applied Science and Investigations group at Weidlinger Associates, Inc. (Now Weidlinger Applied Science at Thornton Tomasetti). Dr. Shields joined the faculty of Civil Engineering at JHU in July 2013 where he holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Dr. Shields is an active member of several professional organizations including the American Society of Civil Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, US Association for Computational Mechanics, and Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics; serving on committees for each related to uncertainty quantification and probabilistic methods. He is also the recipient of several professional awards including the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.


Research Interests:

Prof. Shields works in the field of uncertainty quantification and probabilistic computational mechanics. His work emphasizes stochastic simulation-based techniques for uncertainty quantification and propagation in large, nonlinear, and complex computational structural and materials models. He is most interested in improving the tractability and feasibility of uncertainty quantification for computational mechanics applications through novel simulation techniques to facilitate realistic structural performance and reliability analyses. Applications of interest are numerous:

  • Generation of stochastic processes/fields for structural loading (e.g. earthquake, wind time histories) and characterization
  • Generation of stochastic material microstructures
  • Integration of uncertainty in material constitutive modeling to assess structural performance and reliability
  • Propagation of uncertainty across length scales
  • Verification & validation of computational models considering uncertainty in both the model and the experimental validation data
  • Many more

For a more detailed discussion of Dr. Shields' work, see the SURG Research Page.