Congratulations Yara!
On the 5th of July, Yara Rossi successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled "Next Generation Monitoring of Strong Ground Motions and Structural Vibrations - Combining Accelerometer, GNSS and Rotation Sensors".
Yara is one of the last doctoral students from the Mathematical and Physical Geodesy (MPG) group led by Prof. Rothacher.
During her doctoral studies she was co-supervised by Prof. Markus Rothacher and Dr. John Clinton and worked in close collaboration with Prof. Eleni Chatzi, a rare collaboration between Geodesy, Seismology and Structural Engineering.
In her thesis, Yara investigated two different methods, a linear Kalman filter and an Unscented Kalman filter, to fuse acceleration data, GNSS positions and rotation measurements for the two applications - seismic ground motion and structural motion tracking. This allows to recover the motion of the ground or a structure in near real time for a broad frequency range, as pure rotation and pure translation components. Her thesis ‘Next Generation Monitoring of Strong Ground Motions and Structural Vibrations - Combining Accelerometer, GNSS and Rotation Sensors' additionally investigates the application of using a rotational sensor in addition to an accelerometer at a single site for structural characterization. By taking advantage of the high information content at a single point, it is possible for the first time to characterise a building in terms of modal frequency and 6 component mode shape for the fundamental modes.
After the doctoral defense, there was a nice apéro with the examination committee, colleagues, and family to celebrate Yara's achievement.
