Preface Special issue of the Journal of Structural Safety in honor of Professor James L. Beck This special issue of Structural Safety is published to honor James L. Beck, Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), on the occasion of his 60th birthday in February 2009. Jim has been on the faculty at Caltech since 1981 in the Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory group. He served as Executive Officer (Chair) for Ap- plied Mechanics and Civil Engineering from 1993 to 1998 and last year he also joined the Control and Dynamical Systems group at Caltech. Jim’s research career spans four decades, primarily in earth- quake engineering, structural dynamics, and stochastic analysis and Bayesian updating of dynamic systems. He has 300 technical publications, a third in archival journals, which cover topics in earthquake engineering, plasticity modeling, system identification using seismic response data and ambient vibration data, structural health monitoring, information-based optimal sensor location, probabilistically-robust structural control, seismic risk and loss estimation, stochastic response analysis and reliability, reliabil- ity-based optimal structural design, probability logic, Bayesian updating and model class assessment, Bayesian state estimation, Bayesian machine learning for classification, and automated deci- sion procedures for earthquake early warning systems. In recent years, he has become interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics, working on a probability logic approach to the stochas- tic dynamics of elementary particles, including a stochastic Hamil- ton’s principle that leads to Schrödinger’s equation. Jim completed his BS and MS degrees with First Class Honors in Mathematics from the University of Auckland in New Zealand in December 1969 and December 1970, respectively. While an under- graduate, he worked during the summers in the Physics and Engi- neering Laboratory (PEL) of the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in Wellington. This led to his first journal paper ‘‘A New Reflecting Microscope Objective with Two Concentric Spherical Mirrors” published in Applied Optics in July 1969. After completing his MS degree, he became a full-time Research Scientist at PEL/DSIR. He initially worked on fluid mechanics research in a group that focused on the geothermal fields used for electrical power production in New Zealand, which led to his widely-referenced second paper: ‘‘Convection in a Box of Porous Material Saturated with Fluid” published in Physics of Fluids in 1972. After being presented with a challenging structural dynamics problem that arose from an innovative viaduct design by engineers from New Zealand Railways, he started working in the Engineering Seismology Section of PEL/DSIR in 1973, producing two pioneering papers published in the International Journal of Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics: ‘‘The Seismic Response of a Reinforced Concrete Bridge Pier Designed to Step” co-authored with R. Ivan Skinner (June 1974), and a paper on base isolation of buildings, ‘‘A Practical System for Isolating Structures from Earthquake Attack” with Skinner and G. Noel Bycroft (March 1975). In 1974, Jim was awarded a New Zealand National Research Advisory Council Fellowship to study abroad and that year he en- tered Caltech in Pasadena, California, to do his doctoral studies un- der Professor Paul C. Jennings. He completed his PhD in Civil Engineering in June 1978 with a thesis titled ‘‘Determining Models of Structures from Earthquake Records”. After returning to PEL/ DSIR in New Zealand for another 3 years, Jim joined the faculty at Caltech as an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering in August 1981. Since then, he has mentored 24 doctoral students, 6 post- doctoral students, and 6 visiting doctoral students on extended stays, who worked with him on a broad range of research topics. In 1997, he received the Graduate Student Council Award for Excel- lence in Teaching at Caltech. He currently teaches two classes at Caltech: a graduate engineering mathematics class on linear spaces, operator theory, nonlinear differential equations and varia- tional calculus, and a graduate class on stochastic system analysis and Bayesian updating. Jim has served on many US and international professional soci- ety committees. From 1995 to 1999, he served on the Board of the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering, including officer positions of Vice-President, President and Past- President. He is currently an inaugural member of the Board of Governors of the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute and was a member and Vice-Chair of the Executive Committee of the former ASCE EMD (Engineering Mechanics Division). He is a former Chair of the ASCE EMD Dynamics Committee, a former Control Member of its Probabilistic Methods Committee and he was the founding Chair of the ASCE-IASC Task Group on Structural Health Monitor- ing, which established a series of benchmarks on this topic. He is active in the International Association of Structural Safety and Reli- ability (IASSAR), serving as Chair of the IASSAR Committee on Sys- tem Identification and Structural Control and he has served on the Scientific Committee for several previous International Confer- ences on Structural Safety and Reliability organized by IASSAR. He has organized many sessions and mini-symposiums at national and international conferences, which include in recent years ICOS- SAR05 in Rome, EURODYN05 in Paris, COMPDYN07 in Rethymno, Crete, WCCM08 in Venice, ICOSSAR09 in Osaka, and COMPDYN09 in Rhodes. In June 2005, Jim was awarded the IASSAR Senior Research Prize in Computational Stochastic Mechanics in Rome and in July 2008, he received the Senior Research Prize in Computational Structural Dynamics in Southampton from the European Association of Structural Dynamics. He was an invited keynote speaker at EURO- DYN05 in Paris (Reliability of Dynamical Systems by Stochastic 0167-4730/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.strusafe.2010.03.003 Structural Safety 32 (2010) 273–274 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Structural Safety journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/strusafe