Opening Plenary

Friday, October 23
8:30 – 10:00 a.m. 

25 Years Later: Decoding the Resilience of 9/11

Speaker: Richard Garlock, P.E., Partner LERA Consulting Structural Engineers

Lunch Plenary

Friday, October 23
12:15 - 2:00 p.m.

NIST’s Technical Findings of their NCST Investigation of Champlain Towers South 

Speakers: Judith Mitrani-Reiser, Senior Research Scientist, NIST, Co-lead Investigator
Glenn R. Bell, Research Civil Engineer, NIST, Co-lead Investigator

The presentation will summarize the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) National Construction Safety Team (NCST) technical findings on the causes of the June 24, 2021 partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Florida, which took the lives of 98 people.

Following an extensive technical investigation, the investigative team concluded that the collapse began in early June 2021, when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed in punching shear. These initial column failures caused cracks to grow and loads to redistribute in the pool deck over the next three weeks, resulting in the transfer of their loads to adjacent slab-column connections that were not strong enough to support them. This led to the larger catastrophic collapse on June 24. After the failure of the initial two columns, the failure spread to other elements of the pool deck and street-level parking structure, eventually unseating the southern edge of the pool deck slab from a supporting wall. This caused the slab to sag further and eventually break away at its northern edge from the face of the middle part of the tower. When the pool deck slab broke away, it damaged two connections supporting that part of the tower. The failure then progressed through the middle part of the tower, followed by the east part. 

The presenters will describe the innovative, cross-disciplinary investigative approaches employed to determine the multiple causes and contributors to the initiation and progression of the failure.

Dr. Judith Mitrani-Reiser is a Senior Research Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and has dedicated her career to the reduction of losses from disasters and failures in our built environment.

Judy previously served as the Associate Chief of the Materials and Structural Systems Division and the Director of the Disaster & Failure Studies Program of the Engineering Laboratory at NIST. Before switching to a career in public service, she served on the faculty of the Departments of Civil Engineering and of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She has led research projects and transdisciplinary teams in multi-hazard impacts, community resilience, evacuation modeling, and performance of healthcare facilities. Judy currently leads NIST's National Construction Safety Team (NCST) investigation of the partial collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida. She also leads the mortality project of the NCST investigation of Hurricane Maria’s impacts on Puerto Rico. At NIST, she provides leadership for national hazards reduction programs, including the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP), and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP). Judy currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Earthquake Engineering (IAEE), and on the Executive Committee of CROSS-US (Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures – US). She previously served as the Vice President of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) in 2021, on EERI’s Board of Directors from 2018 to 2021, and was honored as the 2023 EERI Distinguished Lecturer. 

Judy is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), where she co-founded SEI’s Committee on Multi-Hazard Mitigation. She was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Alumni at the University of California, Berkeley in 2021, and has received several NIST awards for her mentorship, dedication to a safe working environment, and her advocacy for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Judy received her Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2007, M.S. in Structural Engineering, Mechanics, and Materials from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001, and B.S. in Civil and Coastal Engineering from the University of Florida in 2000. 

Glenn joined NIST in 2021 to lead the NCST Investigation of the Champlain Towers South collapse. From 1975 to 2020 he was employed at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (SGH), were he worked in structural design, structural rehabilitation, and the investigation of failures. He investigated the walkways collapse at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Kansas City, the scaffold collapse at the John Hancock Center, Chicago, served on SGH’s team that conducted analyses for NIST’s NCST investigation of WTC Towers 1 and 2 after 9/11, and evaluated the effects of alkali-silica reaction in the concrete of the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant.

His structural design projects include SpaceShip Earth at Walt Disney World Epcot Center and the Aga Khan Medical Complex in Karachi, Pakistan. Glenn served as SGH’s CEO from 1995 through 2016, a period of major growth in size, expertise, and reputation of the firm. Glenn’s professional passion is structural safety, especially in investigating failures and employing the lessons learned from them to improve practice and avert future disasters. 

He co-founded the American Society of Civil Engineer’s (ASCE) Technical Council on Forensic Engineering and was the principal driver in establishing Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures – US, where he currently serves as Director. He authored the chapter Engineering Investigation of Failures in the Forensic Structural Engineering Handbook (McGraw-Hill, 2000). Glenn is the Past-President of the Structural Engineering Institute of ASCE and is a Board Member of the Charles Pankow Foundation. Glenn earned a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from Tufts University and an M.S. in Structural Engineering and Structural Mechanics from the University of California at Berkeley. 

He is a registered PE in six states and in the District of Columbia. He is a registered Structural Engineer in Illinois and a Chartered Engineer in the UK. He has received numerous recognitions for his contributions, including ASCE’s 2012 Forensic Engineering Award, election as a Distinguished Member of ASCE in 2021, election to the National Academy of Engineers in 2024, recipient of the 2025 Gold Medal from the Institution of Structural Engineers, and invited as the Blume Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University in 2026.  

Closing Plenary

Sunday, October 25
8:00 – 9:00 a.m.

Spaceship Earth

Glenn R. Bell, Research Civil Engineer, NIST