The director of a national earthquake research center based at Purdue University says Italian authorities are setting a dangerous precedent by pushing the manslaughter convictions of scientists for not predicting a devastating 2009 earthquake.

Prof. Emeritus Vince Drnevich has been elected Chair of the Indiana State Board of Registration for Professional Engineers. He was appointed to the State Board by Governor Mitch Daniels in 2008.

We congratulate Prof. Emeritus C. William Lovell as we celebrate this milestone in his life and the tremendous impact he has made during his tenure.

Prof. Antonio Bobet, professor of civil engineering and associate director of the Global Engineering Program, has been chosen to serve on the Geotechnical Advisory Board (GAB) for the Panama Canal. The canal is undergoing a $5.5 billion expansion to double its capacity by 2014. The project will create a new lane of traffic along the canal by constructing a new set of locks.

The award was given in recognition of his exceptional commitment to broadening the reach of scholarship by making publicly-funded research freely accessible online in collaboration with Purdue Libraries.

The Geo-Institute Graduate Student Organization (GI-GSO) at Purdue University had an extraordinary field trip to the Panama Canal. The group included nine geotechnical graduate students, members of GI-GSO, and faculty advisors Prof. Bobet and Prof. Drnevich.

Bridges and More takes the reader from the early years of Civil Engineering when Purdue's campus consisted of a smattering of red brick buildings surrounded by grassy meadows and roads flanked by white, wooden fences to today's state-of-the-art facilities such as the Bowen Laboratory for Large-Scale Civil Engineering Research and the online hub for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES).

Faculty and researchers from Purdue's School of Civil Engineering and Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, together with a consortium of engineering companies led by Applied Research Associates (ARA), have been awarded a contract with a value of up to $9.9M to assist the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Congratulations to Prof. Santiago Pujol, recipient of the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

CE senior Skyler Potts returned to classes this fall with a better understanding of professional engineering after a 12-week internship at Greeley and Hansen.

The Purdue University civil engineering building has been named for alumnus and donor Delon Hampton and his mother, Elizabeth Hampton. The naming ceremony was held on Friday, September 14th.