Book excerpt: This is the twenty-sixth volume in the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute's series, Connections: The EERI Oral History Series. EERI began this series to preserve the recollections of some of those who have had pioneering careers in the field of earthquake engineering.Mete Sozen (1932-2018) is the Karl H. Kettelhut Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, United States.Besides his academic interest in the development of design codes for concrete structures, Sozen is notable for his contributions to the official post 9/11-government studies of terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing, and The Pentagon. Sozen also led a team that created an engineering simulation of American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The computer-animated visualizations were made entirely from the simulation data. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1977 for contributions to understanding the structural design and behavior of buildings and bridges subjected to earthquake motions.Sozen received his undergraduate education at Robert College (Turkey, 1951) and his master's (1952) and doctoral degrees (1957) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.