Natural Hazards and Risks in Structural Engineering

The Natural Hazards and Risks in Structural Engineering (NHRE) master’s degree programme has a strong international orientation. It trains students to apply themselves to demanding engineering tasks with regard to specific external influences, such as earthquakes. We teach students how to use modern equipment to assess the dangers and damage potential of natural phenomena, we show them how to create models and simulations, and we prepare them for conducting projects and- risk analyses of their own. In this way, the programme provides students with key qualifications for engineering positions which require innovative, enterprising solutions for dealing with a wide variety of natural dangers, like earthquakes, floods and storms.

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The occurrence of an increasing number of natural hazards all over the world and their various effects on individuals, societies and modern economies is one of the major challenges for future decades. The master course in "Natural Hazards and Risks in Structural Engineering" faces this challenge by providing indispensable tools for taking into account those phenomena in the different design processes in civil engineering. Thereby, the master course aims at combining practical structural engineering with state-of-the-art concepts regarding computational mechanics, dynamics and probability theory/stochastic analysis. Consequently, the master course provides key qualifications for innovative work in the field of earthquake, flood and wind engineering and offers an international setting in which students will achieve both technical success and personal advancement. Main areas covered by the master course in "Natural Hazards and Risks in Structural Engineering" are earthquake engineering and structural design, Geo- and hydrotechnical engineering, Finite element methods and structural dynamics, non-linear analysis of structures under extreme loading, stochastics and risk assessment, as well as disaster management and mitigation strategies. The course program covers, thereby, both theoretical and application orientated topics.