Citation on the award of NZSEE Fellow, April 2023
Greg MacRae is conferred Fellowship of the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering for his services both to the Society, the Bulletin, and for his work in earthquake engineering professional practice in New Zealand.
Greg has been teaching and undertaking research in structural and earthquake engineering since 1986 in New Zealand, Japan, the USA, India, and China. In 2021, he was ranked amongst the top 2% of Civil Engineering researchers world-wide, by the global publishing group Elsevier.
In New Zealand, Greg made the single most significant impact towards the current provisions for the seismic design of steel structures, through his landmark PhD project and thesis, The Seismic Response of Steel Frames, published in 1989. This thesis formed the basis for the current capacity design procedures for moment resisting and eccentrically braced steel frames, with the concept and procedure subsequently extended to concentrically braced steel frames. The excellent performance of these systems in the severe earthquakes of 2010 to 2016 is testament to the soundness of his work.
He has made a major contribution to all revisions of, and amendments to, the Steel Structures Standard, NZS3404, from 1992 to the revision currently underway. He has also made a major contribution to the development of the Earthquake Loadings Standard, NZS 1170.5 and to the publication of many design guides. He is a member of many technical organisations in New Zealand and overseas, including SESOC and the NZSEE, where he is currently on the Management Committee, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Architectural Institute of Japan, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the Structural Engineers Association of Washington.
Greg is also a member of the NZSEE Bulletin Editorial Board, has published 24 papers in the Bulletin, and has chaired numerous sessions and presented dozens of papers in the NZSEE Conferences over several decades. He is the Lead Researcher for the ROBUST project, a 3 storey, seismically resilient steel framed structure which is being tested in 2023 on the large shake table array at Tongji University, China. This is multi-million dollar New Zealand/Chinese research project includes many New Zealand institutions and a large Chinese contingent of researchers. The building incorporates 9 different, interchangeable seismic resisting systems, and the testing will include both the bare structure and the structure with non-skeletal elements. In addition to his very significant contribution to standards in New Zealand, his work has been incorporated into standards in the USA and Japan.
There is much more that could be said involving Greg’s accomplishments, but the positive impact his 1986 to 1989 PhD project and ongoing research has had on subsequent steel structures seismic design practice in New Zealand is reason in itself.
His efforts are very greatly appreciated by the Society and are acknowledged with the award of a New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering Fellowship.
