On the morning of December 30, 2021, a grass fire broke out in Boulder County, Colorado on Marshall Road. It quickly began spreading due to 100 mile per hour winds and arid conditions. Just days after the fire’s end, Professor Andrew Whelton boarded a plane to Colorado at the request of community leaders to assess and assist in response and recovery.

Daniel Castro-Lacouture (PhD '03), a professor and administrator at Georgia Institute of Technology, will be the new dean of the Purdue Polytechnic Institute, effective June 1.

Dr. Matthew W. Witczak (Ph.D. 1969), Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at the University of Maryland, passed away at his home on Tuesday, January 18th.

An NSF-funded research project led by Jan Olek and Pablo Zavattieri using 3D concrete printing to anchor offshore wind turbines is featured in the January 2022 edition of Concrete Products magazine.

The vulnerability of existing civil infrastructure to natural hazards presents one of the greatest risks to life, safety and property that the world faces today. It also impacts the resiliency and sustainability of communities.

The research team of Jinha Jung, Purdue University and Zhou Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison have been awarded a grant from the U.S. National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative (AG2PI) to advance research in sharing data using public cloud services from unoccupied aerial systems.

CE alumnus Hani Mahmassani (MSCE '78) has been awarded the Transportation Research Board’s 2021 Roy W. Crum Award for outstanding achievement in transportation research.

The College of Engineering recognized faculty, lecturers and other staff for their outstanding dedication to teaching Boilermaker Engineers.

Tim Gunn (BSCE '91), Vice President of Construction for Alberici Constructors, Inc., along with the SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital campus renewal project team, has been recognized by Engineering News-Record with the Health Care Award of Merit for their innovative approach to modular design and off-site construction.

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.