Professor B.F. Spencer Jr. is the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois.  He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (University of Missouri – Rolla 1981), and M.S. and Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1983, 1985). He joined the faculty of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois in 2002. Dr. Spencer served as a professor at the University of Notre Dame from 1985-2002, where he held the Leo E. and Patti Ruth Linbeck Professor of Engineering.

Dr. Spencer has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in structural mechanics, structural dynamics, and structural reliability. He is the author of two books. The first is a monograph entitled, On the Reliability of Nonlinear Hysteretic Structures Subjected to Broadband Random Excitation (Springer-Verlag 1986). The second book, coauthored with Prof. K. Sobczyk, is entitled, Random Fatigue: From Data to Theory (Academic Press 1992).

Dr. Spencer is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), was the founding chair of the Committee on Structural Control and is the past chair of the Committee on Fatigue and Fracture Reliability, both in the ASCE Structures Division. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Structural Control and has served as associate editor for the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering. He is also a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the North American Editor in Chief of Smart Structures and Systems, and the president of the Asia-Pacific Network of Centers for Research in Smart Structures Technology.