On Friday, Nov. 19th, as time approached midnight, two teams of students from Purdue's Civil Engineering department placed first and second in an international competition involving students from eight universities (four from Japan, one from Turkey, and three from the U.S.).

In the competition, the students are asked to make small-scale bridges with common materials (such as small wood sticks, rope, and styrofoam).  The winning bridges this year carried loads equal to 100 times their weight.

This is the fourth year the competition has been held.  The first year (2007) Purdue won second place. This year, for the first time, Purdue won first place (as well as second).

This year, the competition was held live on The NEEShub.  The NEEShub is an IT product created by NEES (an NSF-funded research network with headquarters at Purdue).  NEEShub supports, among many other resources, telepresence tools to allow collaboration of researchers interested in structures around the world.

The winning team was led by Nathaniel Sedra, a sophomore in CE. His teammates included CE undergraduate students Michael Mertz, Justin Chris and Allan Peng.  They were one of three undergraduate teams selected to represent Purdue in the competition along with two teams of graduate students.  These teams were selected through an internal competition that involved over thirty teams.

The second place team consisted of CE graduate students Allen DeSchepper and John Lyrenmann. The design of the bridge was the product of a long effort in which many students participated (including Mike Wesson, Chungwook Sim, and Eduardo Perez, among others). The teams were directed by Professors Ghadir Haikal and Santiago Pujol, faculty members in the Structures Area in CE.