About

Maria Garlock is the Daniel Tsui Professor in Engineering and serves as the Head of Forbes College at Princeton University. She holds a PhD in Structural Engineering from Lehigh University, an MS in Civil Engineering from Cornell University, and a BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Lehigh University. Her research focuses on bridging the gap between academia and practice in structural engineering design, with particular emphasis on creative and resilient structural design for extreme loads such as fires, earthquakes, and storm surges. She studies these hazards both as isolated and cascading multi-hazard events, aiming to advance structural design and improve understanding of effective structural solutions from the past and present. Dr. Garlock also investigates innovative methods for teaching structural engineering to non-STEM majors, utilizing coursework, exhibitions, instructional displays, and MOOCs. She is actively involved in academic leadership, serving on the Executive Committee of the Council on Science and Technology and as Program Director for the Architecture and Engineering Program at Princeton. Her scholarly contributions have been recognized through numerous awards, including fellowships and distinguished teaching honors, and her work is published and cited widely in the field.

Research topics

• Materials science
• Composite material
• Engineering
• Structural engineering
• Metallurgy

Selected publications

• Delamination and structural response of RC thin shell in nuclear shield buildings with unanticipated construction openings*

  2026-02-04

  article

  This paper examines the structural response in a thin shell concrete dome with construction openings. The weight of the dome is carried in axial compression along the hoops and meridians of the dome. The openings interrupt the hoops and meridians and the dome’s weight must be redistributed around the openings; resulting in zones of increased compression near the opening. In the affected areas there is a significant difference between the compression on the top surface of the dome, and that on the bottom surface. The dome was cast in two layers. This study examines the potential for fracture (and thus delamination) as a result shear stress at the interface of the two layers. The stresses are largest around the opening. The shear capacity of the interface is determined by previous empirical studies of composite beams. The shear stresses in the dome with openings are not large enough to cause delamination.

  PublisherDOI

• Hyperbolic Paraboloid Free-Surface Breakwaters: Hydrodynamic Study and Structural Evaluation

  Journal of Marine Science and Engineering · 2025-01-27 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This study investigates the potential of hyperbolic paraboloid (hypar) shapes for enhancing wave attenuation and structural efficiency in Free-Surface Breakwaters (FSBW). A decoupled approach combining Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and Finite Element Method (FEM) is employed to analyze hypar-faced FSBW performance across varying hypar warping values and wave characteristics. SPH simulations, validated through experiments, determine wave attenuation performance and extract pressure values for subsequent FEM analysis. Results indicate that hypar-faced FSBW produces increased wave attenuation compared to traditional flat-faced designs, particularly for shorter wave periods and smaller drafts. Furthermore, hypar surfaces exhibit up to three times lower principal stresses under wave loading compared to the flat counterpart, potentially allowing for thinner surfaces. The study also shows that peak-load static stress values provide a reasonable approximation for preliminary design, with less than 6% average difference compared to dynamic analysis results. In summary, this research presents hypar-faced FSBW as a promising alternative in coastal defense strategies, offering effective wave attenuation and structural efficiency in the context of rising sea levels and increasing storm intensities.

  PublisherDOI

• INVESTIGATION OF HYPERBOLIC PARABOLOID FACE PROFILE EFFICACY FOR FREE-SURFACE BREAKWATERS

  Coastal Engineering Proceedings · 2025-05-29

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Coastal regions worldwide face escalating challenges from intensified storm events and rising sea levels (Vardy et al., 2017). With rapid urbanization and increase in coastal land demand, there's a pressing need for innovative and sustainable coastal defense solutions (Sahavacharin et al., 2022). Located near the water's surface, Free-Surface Breakwaters (FSBW) stand out as a compelling solution to protect coastal infrastructure due to its ability to be deployed in deeper waters, high mobility, relatively low production and installation cost, and reduced environmental impact (Teh, 2013). Furthermore, the FSBW can be fabricated on land and deployed to the intended sea area relatively easily by towing it, regardless of the soil foundation or complexity of the bathymetry. FSBW can be either be fixed or floating, with reinforced concrete box-type with flat faces being the most common design (Teh, 2013). The current study examines both the hydrodynamic and structural performance of fixed FSBW with hyperbolic paraboloid (hypar) faces, which is a novel approach.

  PublisherDOI

• An SPH study of cross-sectional shape effects on coastal structures subject to regular wave forces

  Ocean Engineering · 2025-09-25 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• COASTAL HAZARD MITIGATION VIA STRUCTURAL SHAPE MODIFICATION: INVESTIGATING THE INFLUENCE OF CURVED STRUCTURAL CROSS-SECTIONS ON WAVE FORCES USING SPH MODELING

  Coastal Engineering Proceedings · 2025-05-29

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  When hurricanes strike, the forces of hurricane- induced waves acting on coastal structures may cause significant damage and loss to coastal communities. For instance, structures were damaged by the strikes of Hurricane Ivan (2004), Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Typhoon Haiyan (2013), which led to tremendous loss (Chen et al., 2021). Previous studies have shown that structural geometry plays a significant role in determining the associated wave forces and well-designed structural geometries would be able to reduce wave force magnitude and thus facilitate coastal resilience (Hayatdavoodi and Cengiz Ertekin, 2016; Chen et al., 2021).

  PublisherDOI

• Neural Network-Based Prediction of Wave Pressure Distribution on Hyperbolic Paraboloid Surfaces

  Journal of Marine Science and Engineering · 2025-11-29

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of hyperbolic paraboloid (hypar), a doubly curved geometry, in coastal engineering applications. Predicting pressure distribution, critical for subsequent finite element analysis, on such novel three-dimensional structures require Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, which are computationally intensive. To address this challenge, the current study develops an artificial neural network (ANN) surrogate to predict pressure distributions on hypar free-surface breakwaters (FSBWs) under solitary wave loading. Using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) as the CFD tool, simulations generate the supervised learning dataset, where inputs are the hypar warping Rn, breakwater draft dr, and wave height H. The targets consist of two 30×30 pressure maps at wave arrival (hydrostatic) and peak, together with the wave rise time {P(t0), P(tpeak), Δt=tpeak−t0}. Three architectures, FNN, CNN, and DeepONet, are trained with homoscedastic uncertainty loss weighting, each at two parameter sizes (~50k and ~500k). Results for training and testing show that all models achieve low errors, with models with ~50k parameters found to be sufficient, and scaling to ~500k yields some generalization improvement. Further reducing the parameters (~5k) degrades accuracy for all models, with DeepONet proven most robust to parameter size reduction. Overall, this study introduces a novel SPH-ANN workflow for predicting wave pressures on hypar FSBWs, where inference on new samples occurs in a few milliseconds per sample, delivering orders-of-magnitude speedups relative to running new SPH simulations. This computational efficiency enables rapid design iteration and optimization of hypar FSBWs, facilitating their potential deployment in coastal defense.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Efficacy of numerical models for capturing the local and global response of steel plate girders in shear

  Engineering Structures · 2025-06-10 · 1 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Efficacy of Numerical Models for Capturing the Local and Global Response of Steel Plate Girders in Shear

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Mechanical performance of sinusoidally architected concrete enabled by robotic additive manufacturing

  Materials & Design · 2024-01-21 · 20 citations

  articleOpen access

  Concrete additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging technology that enables the fabrication of complex and efficient geometries with intricate features. Here, the mechanical performance of bio-inspired sinusoidally architected concrete is investigated in comparison to monolithic, cast counterparts. A robotic additive manufacturing process was utilized to fabricate sinusoidal architectures in three orientations (denoted X, Y, and Z) and two rectilinear architectures and compared to conventionally cast specimens of equivalent geometries. Single-edge bend and single-edge-notched bend experiments were performed to test the strength and fracture toughness, respectively. Unlike rectilinear architectures, the X and Z-Sinusoidal architected concrete elicited a flexural strength and fracture toughness statistically equivalent to cast counterparts, whereas the Y-Sinusoidal architecture exhibited a 71 % increase in flexural strength as compared to the cast counterparts. Finite element simulations were carried out to evaluate the effect of sinusoidal frequency and amplitude on stress distribution through the test specimens. In addition, a theoretical analysis of stress concentration was conducted to understand the role of sinusoidal perturbation from surface to core. The sinusoidal architectures were observed to produce stress concentrations and non-uniform stress profiles (depending on two design variables, i.e., amplitude, A, and wavelength, λ), which led to outperforming rectilinear additively manufactured and cast counterparts.

  PublisherDOI

• Out-of-flatness of steel plate girder webs, Part II: Shear strength and behavior

  Journal of Constructional Steel Research · 2024-05-28 · 5 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Fire Engineering Guidelines for the Design of Steel Beam-Columns

  NSF · $40k · 2007–2010

• Collaborative Research: Fire Damage Mitigation and Post-Fire Evaluation of Steel Girder Bridges

  NSF · $175k · 2011–2015

• Collaborative Research: Guidelines for the Design of Steel Shear Angle Connections Under Fire Hazard

  NSF · $120k · 2008–2011

• Collaborative Research: Advancing the Dissemination of the Creative Art of Structural/Civil Engineering

  NSF · $499k · 2014–2019

• BRITE Pivot: Advancing Knowledge in Water-Shell Structure Interaction Through Discovery of Efficient Hydrodynamic and Structural Thin-shell Forms

  NSF · $599k · 2023–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Spencer E. Quiel

  Lehigh University

  36 shared

• Negar Elhami Khorasani

  University at Buffalo, State University of New York

  27 shared

• James M. Ricles

  Lehigh University

  20 shared

• Richard Sause

  19 shared

• David P. Billington

  19 shared

• Ignacio Payá-Zaforteza

  18 shared

• Branko Glišić

  Princeton University

  16 shared

• Shengzhe Wang

  University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

  15 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE) St…
• T.R. Higgins Lectureship Award 2016
• President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2012) at Princ…
• Lawrence Keyes, Jr. /Emerson Electric Co. Faculty Advancemen…
• Professors Branko Glisic and Maria Garlock win Getty Foundat…