| Aug 26, 2026 | The Learning From Earthquakes Virtual Earthquake Reconnaissance Team (VERT) report on the M7.4 San José del Palmar, Colombia earthquake (August 10, 2026) has been released. The report documents publicly available data on the earthquake and its impacts within a week of the event. So far, structural collapses, structural damages, and widespread non-structural damage across critical facilities, housing, and infrastructure have led to many facilities and infrastructure components losing functionality. These impacts are a sobering reminder of the continued need for coordinated efforts across academia, industry, and policy toward resilient cities. Read the report here. |
| Aug 10, 2026 | On August 10, 2026, a M7.4 earthquake struck near San José del Palmar, Colombia, causing widespread infrastructure damage, hundreds of fatalities, and thousands of injuries. Raul participated in post-earthquake field reconnaissance in the days following the event, supporting structural safety inspections in the affected region. We send our condolences to all those affected and to the millions whose family and friends suffered any loss. |
| Jul 14, 2026 | Raul Rincon gave a presentation at the 13th National Conference in Earthquake Engineering (13NCEE) at Portland, OR. |
| Jun 05, 2026 | Raul Rincon presented ongoing research with Jamie Padgett and Mauricio Sanchez-Silva at the Engineering Mechanics Institute Conference (EMI 2026) at CU Boulder. |
| May 28, 2026 | Raul Rincon presented at the 2026 NHERI SimCenter Computational Symposium at UC Berkeley. |
| Apr 30, 2026 | Raul Rincon has been appointed as a full member of the Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) Objective Resilience Committee (ORC). |
| Apr 17, 2026 | Raul Rincon was awarded the Ralph Budd Ph.D. Engineering Thesis Award. This award is given for the best-written thesis in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing at Rice University. |
| Mar 20, 2026 | Raul Rincon was invited to present at the 2026 NHERI GSC March General Meeting. His presentation, titled “Examining Infrastructure Failures in Socio-Physical Systems Using Attributed Graph Models”, is available on the NHERI GSC YouTube channel. |
| Feb 18, 2026 | New collaborative preprint: “Phase Transitions in Collective Damage of Civil Structures under Natural Hazards” — joint work with Sebin Oh, Jinyan Zhao, Jamie E. Padgett, and Ziqi Wang. We show that urban structural damage exhibits phase-transition phenomena analogous to first- and second-order transitions in statistical physics, with implications for how engineering modeling practices bias urban risk metrics. Available on arXiv. |
| Oct 24, 2025 | Raul Rincon gave a presentation on “Smart and Objective Modeling of Structure-to-Infrastructure System Performance” for the joint GEOSI-CIMOC research seminar at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. |
| Jul 22, 2025 | Raul Rincon defended his Ph.D. thesis, “Smart and Objective Modeling of Structure-to-Infrastructure System Performance.” |
| Jun 30, 2025 | A collaborative paper published in the Journal Structural Engineering International was awarded the Outstanding Paper Award (Category Scientific Paper). (see the press release) |
| Jun 04, 2025 | Raul Rincon gave a presentation at the 14th International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability - ICOSSAR’25 in Los Angeles, CA. He was selected as one of the IASSAR Best Student Paper Award (infrastructure group). |
| Apr 07, 2025 | Raul Rincon accepted a tenure-track faculty position at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering Department. He will join as Assistant Professor in Fall 2026 (see note by Rice University). |
| Jun 28, 2024 | Raul Rincon was selected as a 2024-2025 Future Faculty Fellow by the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University (see note). |
| May 30, 2024 | Raul Rincon gave a presentation at the Engineering Mechanics Institute Conference and Probabilistic Mechanics & Reliability Conference EMI 2024 in Chicago, IL. He was awarded the 1st Place EMI Objective Resilience Student Paper/Presentation Competition |