Luis Ibarra, assistant professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, is one of six professors from the University of Utah that have been named Fulbright Scholars for the 2026-27 academic year.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by the Institute of International Education, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program selects over 800 U.S. scholars to teach or conduct research in institutions around the world, building connections through international collaboration.

The prestigious honor recognizes professors’ academic excellence and leadership potential. Recipients’ time spent abroad is marked by groundbreaking research, innovative teaching and valuable international connections.

Ibarra’s Fulbright scholarship will see him teach and conduct research at Japan’s Nagoya University. A civil engineer who studies how buildings respond to earthquakes, Ibarra will contribute to ongoing experiments at the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention and its state-of-the-art “E-Defense” research facilities. There, life-sized model buildings — as tall as ten stories — are shaken under controlled conditions while their structural performance is monitored.

These large-scale experiments are expensive and labor-intensive but they provide unique data on buildings’ nonlinear structural performance under earthquakes. Ibarra’s research will combine these experimental data with machine learning methodologies to integrate high-fidelity experimental test results with low-fidelity data generated from numerical simulations. The resulting models will enable engineers to make more accurate predictions of how new and existing buildings will perform during future seismic events.

Ibarra will also teach modules of undergraduate and graduate courses on structural engineering, and offer several seminars at different institutions in Japan. The project’s goals include enhancing cross-cultural teaching by exposing Japanese students to U.S. approaches and integrating Japanese methods into U.S. classrooms.

“E-Defense is a unique resource, so this project will strengthen U.S.-Japan collaborations and expand access to the large-scale experimental dataset it produces,” says Ibarra. “Ultimately, we want to to design safer, more resilient buildings, and to advance earthquake engineering through international collaboration.”

Read about the U’s other Fulbright Scholars here.