Effective March 1, 2026, Spencer Quiel, Professor of Structural Engineering, has been named Co-Associate Director of the Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (I-CPIE) at Lehigh University. He was recently the Associate Chair of Lehigh’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Quiel specializes in extreme loads for structures and works in the areas of resilient physical infrastructure (e.g., buildings, bridges, tunnels) pertaining to events like fire, blast, and progressive collapse.
Quiel succeeds Alberto Lamadrid, Professor of Economics, as I-CPIE Co-Associate Director. Lamadrid held that position alongside Carlos Romero, Research Full Professor and Director of the Energy Research Center, from the time of the institute’s founding in 2018 until July 2025, when he became the institute’s director. I-CPIE was founded as part of an initiative headed by P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science Dean Stephen DeWeerth to create interdisciplinary research institutes, designed to promulgate research proposal activity. This also includes the Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems, and Computation (I-DISC) and the Institute for Functional Materials and Devices (I-FMD).
I-CPIE Director Lamadrid says, “Dr. Spencer Quiel brings crucial expertise in infrastructure resilience against extreme, high-consequence events. At I-CPIE, he will strengthen the established ties with critical constituencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Department of Transportation (DOT), the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), and institutes and trade organizations, including the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI). His arrival significantly enhances our ability to pursue large-scale, high-impact proposals in areas such as national defense infrastructure, transportation safety, and disaster resilience.”
Quiel comes to I-CPIE’s leadership team as the institute, in response to a changing federal funding climate, is expanding its scope for proposal submissions. In taking on the role of I-CPIE Co-Associate Director, Quiel aims to take inventory of the research assets and expertise that are already in place at Lehigh and explore how those existing strengths can be applied in new ways or in new configurations to help researchers grow in their careers. He sees his own research as an example: While he initially focused on the response of steel buildings to fire, he has found that some of his core research capabilities could also be applied to steel bridges, concrete tunnels, and energy storage structures under a variety of loading scenarios, allowing him to “create new scholarship” in partnership with other researchers.
Romero recognizes Quiel's strengths and his potential to position I-CPIE for a broader research portfolio, saying, “Professor Quiel will bring a strong infrastructure component to the research enterprise fostered by I-CPIE. His research group is actively engaged in research that involves large-scale assemblies, structural material performance, and a wide spectrum of numerical analysis approaches which are very aligned with many aspects of the research tracks managed by I-CPIE in structural systems, and smart and resilient energy infrastructure.”
This engagement is reflected in Quiel’s research, which include four projects with PennDOT, all related to bridge fire resistance. He has also received research awards from the NSF, US DOT, American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), PCI, and the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance (PITA). Quiel is motivated to bring people together to work collaboratively on projects to amplify their expertise. He says, “It’s really important that we create an ecosystem of research and consistently ask ourselves, what are the capabilities that are in place, where can we find synergy, and where can we go to find resources to unlock their potential.”
Successful funding proposals will not only expand and progress the research done at Lehigh, but also serve as mentorship opportunities for early-career faculty like Claudia Reis and Diego Isidoro Heredia Rosa, both assistant professors in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Quiel says: “Early-career faculty are on an active growth trajectory, and we need to help them cultivate opportunities that would best serve their interests as they build out their scholarship. We should be asking: what do they have in their portfolios that they can also build on with other people?” Becoming part of a larger project as a younger researcher has long-term benefits: it can expand their research footprint; increases their skills in non-research areas like project management, marketing, and accounting; and expands their research group to include additional graduate students, who not only perform research during their studies but also become future researchers after they’ve earned a degree.
I-CPIE was founded as an interdisciplinary research institute with the goal of drawing from a broad research community to address societal issues, and Quiel’s own research reflects this. While he grounds his research in his home discipline of structural engineering, Quiel says that “we should always be seeking to cultivate and expand the application of our expertise. We should all maintain a steady stream of disciplinary work, but we can build things that we hadn't anticipated–it's really just having a willingness to consider new possibilities.”
Quiel joined Lehigh University as an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2013. Before joining Lehigh, he was a project engineer at Hinman Consulting Engineers in Washington, DC. He earned a degree in civil engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2004 and a PhD in Structural Engineering from Princeton University in 2009, where he studied structural fire engineering with Professor Maria Garlock, the Daniel Tsui Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Lehigh was already in Quiel’s academic “family tree” even before his arrival in 2013: Professor Garlock earned both her BS in civil engineering and PhD in structural engineering from Lehigh under the supervision of Professors James Ricles (the current Director of the ATLSS Engineering Research Center) and Richard Sause (the former Director of ATLSS).