About

Barbara G Simpson is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. Her research group consists of a small team of talented students with diverse skills and experience. Her work explores advanced computational and experimental methods to characterize structural response, aiming to develop innovative structural systems that enhance structural performance and mitigate the effects of natural hazards on the built environment. Her research areas include resilient and sustainable design and retrofit of building structures and offshore renewable energy systems, performance-based earthquake engineering, and next-generation computational modeling, including real-time hybrid simulation for fluid-structure interaction.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Structural engineering
• Physics
• Engineering
• Classical mechanics
• Mechanics

Selected publications

• Cyclic Testing of Three-Story Mass Timber Building Structure with Coupled Self-Centering Rocking Walls

  Journal of Architectural Engineering · 2026-03-18

  articleOpen access

  In self-centering rocking walls (SCRWs), mass timber panels can be combined with post-tensioned rods and energy dissipation devices to create low-damage designs. In this paper, a mass timber SCRW consisting of coupled veneer laminated timber (VLT) panels, vertical post-tensioning, and interpanel U-shaped flexural plates was designed using the direct displacement–based design (DDBD) methodology. This coupled VLT-SCRW was experimentally tested as the shear wall of a three-story mass timber building structure to validate the DDBD methodology for the system at full-scale and to characterize its unique behavior. The physical experiment followed a cyclic, quasi-static loading protocol with loads applied to the building structure by actuators at the three floor levels. Structural performance objectives were targeted at three levels of seismic hazards, including building drifts and component limit states. Test results indicate that the structural performance objectives were met, validating this particular design procedure within the bounds of the testing program. The system achieved a ductility ratio of 5.69 and a postyield stiffness ratio of 0.123. A high post-tensioning ratio of 0.81 was selected to meet moment demands in the presence of construction constraints, leading to yielding at a peak interstory drift ratio of 4%.

  PublisherDOI

• Experimental data collected during quasi-static cyclic loading of mass timber lateral force-resisting system tested in a three-story building structure

  Data in Brief · 2026-02-07

  articleOpen access

  . The dataset includes construction drawings and instrumentation plans of the test building structure as references for data collection and analysis. The dataset also includes displacement, strain, force, photograph, and time-lapse video data that collectively represent the structural behavior of the test building structure and its key components, and they are accessible through Mendeley Data with DOI: 10.17632/v6cs4t4zxc.1. This article complements the associated thesis and research publications by providing a peer-reviewed, standardized, and citable documentation of the experimental dataset, focused exclusively on data generation, structure, processing, limitations, and reuse, without duplicating analytical interpretation or conclusion.

  PublisherDOI

• An adaptive model-free robotic force control strategy for hydrodynamic real-time hybrid simulation of floating offshore wind turbines

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Some observations from the first application of a computer vision monitoring of displacements in multi-story buildings during shake-table tests

  Procedia Structural Integrity · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access

  This paper presents an effective computer vision methodology for monitoring displacements in multi-story buildings during shake-table testing, as a convenient alternative to conventional contact sensors. The proposed system, in its simplest configuration, uses only two video cameras: one installed on the roof pointing downward to simultaneously measure absolute and relative horizontal displacements of targets at different floor levels, and one at ground level as a stationary reference to acquire the roof displacement by tracking a target near the internal camera. This setup provides i) redundant roof displacement measurements and ii) compensation for possible noise affecting the internal camera during shaking. The methodology was first applied during the shake-table testing of a full-scale, six-story mass timber building on the 6-DOF outdoor shake-table (LHPOST6) at the University of California San Diego. Based on the results, a critical discussion of the methodology’s performance is presented.

  PublisherDOI

• System Identification of a Full-Scale Six-Story Building with Self-centering Rocking Walls with Distributed Energy Dissipation

  Lecture notes in civil engineering · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Consistent Estimate of Brace Fatigue Life Using Axial Deformations Evaluated from Nodal Displacements

  Journal of Structural Engineering · 2025-05-29

  articleSenior author

  Characterizing the behavior and assessing the performance of concentrically braced frames depends on adequately simulating force redistributions following brace fracture. Commonly, brace models with beam-column elements estimate fatigue life using the Coffin-Manson relationship and Miner’s rule. These “fatigue-material” models accumulate damage based on strains evaluated at each fiber. However, strains evaluated at the fiber level depend on the choice of integration points and subelements used to discretize the brace, leading to variations in estimates of brace fatigue life across studies. Moreover, dependence on the mesh resolution means that the fatigue-material parameters need to be carefully calibrated to the experimental data based on the chosen brace discretization. To achieve consistent strains at the fiber level, some have suggested using 10–20 force-based beam-column subelements. However, force-based elements were formulated to explicitly satisfy the equilibrium between the element and section forces without the need for an overly fine mesh. A “fatigue-member” model is proposed based on axial deformations evaluated at the nodes normalized by the undeformed effective length, which needs only two force-based subelements to consistently estimate brace fatigue life based on the Coffin-Manson relationship and Miner’s rule. The fatigue-member uses deformations calculated from the nodal displacements rather than fiber-level strains, resulting in a low-cycle fatigue model that depends less on the model discretization, such as the number and location of integration points or subelements. Since the node-level deformations are more consistent across a choice of mesh resolution, the proposed node-level approach reduces variations in estimates of brace fatigue life across studies, where independent researchers may have preferences or needs for certain modeling decisions. Moreover, the fatigue-member parameters can be derived directly from experimental data since the proposed fatigue model is independent of the mesh resolution.

  PublisherDOI

• RESILIENT SEISMIC DESIGN OF TALL MASS TIMBER BUILDINGS: COMPARISON OF TWO FULL-SCALE TRI-AXIAL SHAKE TABLE TESTS

  2025-01-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Application Framework and Optimal Features for UAV-Based Earthquake-Induced Structural Displacement Monitoring

  Algorithms · 2025-01-26 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) vision-based sensing has become an emerging technology for structural health monitoring (SHM) and post-disaster damage assessment of civil infrastructure. This article proposes a framework for monitoring structural displacement under earthquakes by reprojecting image points obtained courtesy of UAV-captured videos to the 3-D world space based on the world-to-image point correspondences. To identify optimal features in the UAV imagery, geo-reference targets with various patterns were installed on a test building specimen, which was then subjected to earthquake shaking. A feature point tracking-based algorithm for square checkerboard patterns and a Hough Transform-based algorithm for concentric circular patterns are developed to ensure reliable detection and tracking of image features. Photogrammetry techniques are applied to reconstruct the 3-D world points and extract structural displacements. The proposed methodology is validated by monitoring the displacements of a full-scale 6-story mass timber building during a series of shake table tests. Reasonable accuracy is achieved in that the overall root-mean-square errors of the tracking results are at the millimeter level compared to ground truth measurements from analog sensors. Insights on optimal features for monitoring structural dynamic response are discussed based on statistical analysis of the error characteristics for the various reference target patterns used to track the structural displacements.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Experimental and Numerical Simulation of a Three-Story Mass Timber Building with a Pivoting Wall and Buckling-Restrained Boundary Elements

  Journal of Structural Engineering · 2025-05-13 · 8 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Whole-Building Life-Cycle Assessment in the Built Environment: A Ten- and Six-Story Shake-Table Test Building Case Study

  Forest Products Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Abstract The utilization of mass timber engineered wood products has increased for new buildings aiming to reduce environmental impacts. Whole-building life-cycle assessment (WBLCA) has been used to quantify the environmental impacts for a building’s lifespan. While mechanisms for calculating the cradle-to-grave impacts of a single building are well established, there are few examples of WBLCA applied for buildings in their first and second life that can be used to inform perspectives and pathways related to the circular economy and lead to informed decision making. This work presents a case study WBLCA to examine the effect of overlapping system boundaries and alternative end-of-life pathways for a building structure in its first and second life. This case study analyzed a ten-story mass timber shake-table specimen that was partially deconstructed and reused as a six-story shake-table building structure. Environmental impacts were analyzed in terms of global warming potential (GWP) calculated as the sum of fossil carbon, biogenic carbon, and avoided impacts. When examining reuse and landfill pathway alternatives using current standards and practices, results show that reusing material causes a positive GWP trend in the first system boundary and negative GWP trend in the second boundary. These results could indicate that it is not advantageous to reuse the ten-story building structure, running against principles of waste hierarchy, although the interpretation should be considered with caution. Future analyses could be improved by considering additional criteria such as demand on forest stocks, economic incentives, and even social impacts for a more complete representation of sustainability.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Frame-Spine System with Force-Limiting Connections for Low-Damage Seismic Resilient Buildings

  NSF · $254k · 2019–2023

Frequent coauthors

• André R. Barbosa

  17 shared

• Arijit Sinha

  Oregon State University

  14 shared

• Patricio Uarac

  Stanford University

  11 shared

• Seyed Hossein Zargar

  Pennsylvania State University

  10 shared

• Nathan C. Brown

  10 shared

• John W. van de Lindt

  10 shared

• Pedro Lomónaco

  6 shared

• Yi Qie

  University of Nottingham Ningbo China

  5 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI