Effective Jan. 1, 2022, Luna Lu, ACPA Professor of Civil Engineering, will take over as director of the Office of Professional Practice (OPP).

Congratulations to CE student athletes Alec Fleming (cross country) and Alex Maxwell (football) on being named Academic All-Big Ten for fall 2021.

Jinha Jung, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, is collaborating in a multistate, interdisciplinary research team working to advance new, environmentally friendly and commercially viable control strategies for citrus greening. The four-year project is part of an $11 million suite of grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

Satish Ukkusuri, Reilly Professor of Civil Engineering, has been appointed the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Big Data Analytics in Transportation (BDAT), published by Springer Nature.

Dr. Washim Uddin Mondal, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Lyles School of Civil Engineering, along with Satish Ukkusuri, Reilly Professor of Civil Engineering, received the best paper award in the Cooperative AI workshop at the 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) for their paper, "On the Approximation of Cooperative Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) using Mean Field Control (MFC)."

Can computer modeling and simulation be used to predict and mitigate infrastructure failure? CE‘s Arun Prakash pairs these tools with “digital twins” that constantly update the structure’s condition to detect structural damage and evaluate performance.

Via Medium, CE‘s Robert J. Frosch discusses infrastructure failures and the need for regular forensic investigations to help prevent such tragedies as the June 2021 Surfside condominium collapse.

Nadia Gkritza, Professor of Civil Engineering and Agricultural and Biological Engineering, discusses work being done at ASPIRE Research Center to develop the world's first contactless wireless-charging concrete pavement highway segment in this New York Times article (subscription required).

Purdue experts including Sogand Hasanzadeh, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, provide answers about the Connected Community being developed at the district through 5G and 6G technology.

Wentworth Institute of Technology Civil Engineering Professor and Lyles School of Civil Engineering alumnus James Lambrechts (MSCE 1976) was honored earlier this year by the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section (BSCES) of the American Society of Civil Engineers with two recognitions of distinction: the BSCES Honorary Member Award and the BSCES College Educator Award.

The paper, titled "Intelligent driving intelligence test for autonomous vehicles with naturalistic and adversarial environment," was published in the journal Nature Communications in February of this year.

Transitioning to clean wind energy could become more cost-efficient as Purdue researchers test a new technology created by an international startup to anchor offshore wind turbines. Research on the anchors will be led by CE's Jan Olek and Pablo D. Zavattieri and MSE's Jeffrey P. Youngblood.

The Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (known as I-GUIDE), based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will help researchers better estimate and predict risk and anticipate impacts from natural disasters or climate change.

Dr. Seungjae Lee (Ph.D. '19) started as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering at the University of Toronto (ranked in the top 10 engineering schools worldwide) in July 2021. Seungjae completed his PhD in the Architectural Engineering emphasis area of Civil Engineering. He was advised by Prof. Thanos Tzempelikos and Prof. Panagiota Karava. In 2020-2021 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In October 2021, the Purdue University Board of Trustees ratified a $1.1 million gift made by Specification Products, Inc. The gift goes to further the education and research efforts at the Sustainable Materials and Renewable Technology (SMART) Laboratory — and has been renamed the Joe and Lisa Shetterley Innovation Lab.

Howell Li, the Joint Transportation Research Program’s Principal Research Analyst at Purdue University’s Lyles School of Civil Engineering, leads a team that has developed a new system to manage traffic intersections with signals and to mitigate the risk associated with running a red light.

Powerful partnerships among Purdue University's colleges of agriculture, engineering and science will advance digital forestry tools to save time, money and achieve a deeper understanding of an important natural resource.

The Shah Family Global Innovation Lab has announced six winning teams to receive 2021 seed and design grant awards. Two of the six teams are led by CE faculty, including project proposals for sesame seed harvesting in Malakal, South Sudan (Joe Sinfield) and a water defluoridation system in the Dungarpur, Rajasthan district of India (Amisha Shah, Chad Jafvert, and George Zhou).