Professor Mircea Grigoriu obtained his Ph.D. at M.I.T. in 1976, and has been teaching at Cornell University since 1980. His research interests are in structural dynamics, random vibration, system reliability, stochastic mechanics, fracture mechanics, and applied probability. He has won numerous awards, including ASCE’s prestigious Freudenthal Medal in 2002. He is the author of several well-known books on random processes and computational methods.