The Lyles School of Civil Engineering is proud to announce that six of its faculty received named professorships in 2018.

Ernest Blatchley III
Lee A. Rieth Professor of Environmental Engineering

Professor Blatchley teaches environmental engineering and his research focuses primarily on physicochemical processes. His research team has made significant strides in gaining a greater understanding of the effects of ultraviolet radiation and chlorine on water quality. Applications of his research address the use of ultraviolet radiation and halogens in water treatment, water reuse and water supply in developing countries.

Blatchley has also pioneered the development of photochemical reactor theory to ultraviolet radiation as it applies to disinfection, direct photolysis and advanced oxidation processes. His research has included collaborations with several academic disciplines including environmental engineering, nursing and agricultural economics.

Ayman Habib
Thomas A. Page Professor of Civil Engineering

Professor Habib teaches geomatics engineering. In addition, Habib is co-director of the Civil Engineering Center for Applications of UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) for a Sustainable Environment and associate director of the Joint Transportation Research Program. Habib's research focus includes the use and advancement of modern sensing technologies and platforms such as LiDAR and UAVs to better address the needs of traditional and new applications in fields such as transportation management, infrastructure monitoring, and precision agriculture — such as the development of algorithms to aid connected and autonomous vehicles and to improve crop yield.

Habib's research has him working with the U.S. Department of Energy and the Indiana Department of Transportation in collaboration with faculty members from the schools of Civil Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Agronomy.

Chad Jafvert
Lyles Family Professor of Civil Engineering

Professor Jafvert teaches environmental engineering courses that emphasize water chemistry, water quality modeling, and drinking water treatment in underdeveloped areas around the world. He is an authority on soil-water phase transfer processes of pollutants in the environment. His other research interests include remediation strategies for contaminated sediments, aquatic photochemistry of pollutants including carbon-based nanomaterials, and real-time water-quality monitoring.

Jafvert's work in underdeveloped areas has resulted in the installation of point-of-use drinking water treatment systems in rural schools and communities in Kenya, Tanzania, India, China and Colombia. The effort in Kenya is through a Purdue startup company based in Eldoret, Kenya.

Panagiota Karava
Jack and Kay Hockema Associate Professor of Civil Engineering

Professor Panagiota Karava has been appointed as the Jack and Kay Hockema Associate Professor in Civil Engineering. This is the first "Rising Star" professorship designed to recognize faculty members in the early stages of their career. Karava teaches architectural engineering and is a member of Purdue's Center for High Performance Buildings at Herrick Laboratories.

Her research interests are broadly related to smart building technology and sustainable energy systems. Specific topics include: human-building interactions, self-tuned thermal and visual environments, mixed-mode and solar-optimized buildings, and smart and connected energy-aware communities. Karava has built collaborative initiatives and partnerships. One of her most recent projects funded by the National Science Foundation involves sociotechnical research to foster energy-aware communities enabled by new smart technology and cloud data accessibility.

Julio Ramirez
Karl H. Kettelhut Professor of Civil Engineering

Professor Ramirez teaches structural engineering with an emphasis on buildings, bridges and structural concrete. His research focus is primarily on the lifecycle of infrastructure as well as its resilience against natural disasters such as wind storms, earthquakes and tsunamis.

Ramirez also serves as director of the Network Coordination Office of the National Science Foundation's Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure. NHERI combines investigations from earthquake, wind and coastal engineering, as well as from the social sciences, to render U.S. infrastructure more resilient in the wake of natural disasters. In addition, Ramirez is a co-principal investigator of Resilient Extraterrestrial Habitats, a New Horizons Project funded by the Office of the Provost.

Amit Varma
Karl H. Kettelhut Professor of Civil Engineering

Professor Varma teaches structural engineering and is the director of the Robert L. and Terry L. Bowen Laboratory for Large-Scale Civil Engineering Research. His research focuses on experimentation, analysis and design for extreme loads and hazards including earthquakes, fires and impactive loading. He is deeply invested in steel-concrete composite structures, as well as research on high-rise buildings, modular construction, multihazard design and innovation.

Varma is currently working on concrete-filled composite plate shear walls — a new coupled core wall system in high-rise construction, designed to both speed up the building process and grant greater freedom in the design stages. He is also conducting research on performance-based fire engineering of steel and composite building structures.