Dr. Spencer Quiel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Associate Chair of Structural Engineering at Lehigh University.
Dr. Quiel’s research focuses on the resistance of buildings, bridges, tunnels, and other structures to extreme loads, particularly fire, blast, and progressive collapse. His research group is actively engaged in experimental testing of large-scale assemblies, experimental characterization of structural material performance, and a wide spectrum of numerical analysis approaches. Dr. Quiel’s projects have been awarded more than $1.5 million from organizations including the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Transportation, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, AISC, and PCI. His work has been published in both domestic and international journals and has been presented at conferences in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia.
Before coming to Lehigh, Dr. Quiel worked professionally at Hinman Consulting Engineers in Washington, D.C., where he performed analysis and design of structures to resist extreme loads. During his four years in practice, he was involved in the design and analysis of various structural systems to resist the effects of blast, fire, and progressive collapse. Since arriving at Lehigh, he has served as a technical advisor to several major infrastructure projects as well as a bridge failure investigation. He is a licensed engineer in Pennsylvania and Virginia and is an active member of several professional organizations, including ASCE, AISC, and PCI.
Before entering professional practice, Dr. Quiel completed his doctorate in structural engineering at Princeton University on a Department of Homeland Security Graduate Fellowship. As part of his DHS fellowship, he spent two months at the Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he collaborated on a study of the role of fire in the collapse mechanism of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.