In recognition of its extraordinary community outreach initiatives, the Joint Transportation Research Program, along with programs from three other member universities of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), have been selected as regional winners of the 2019 W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Award. As regional winners, Colorado State University, Cornell University, University of Louisville, and Purdue University will represent and compete for the national C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Scholarship Award, which will be announced during the APLU Annual Meeting November 10-12 in San Diego, California.

In response to the 2018 Camp Fire that caused large-scale damage to public and private drinking water systems across Butte County, California, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering Andrew Whelton will lead a pair of events next week to inform the public on tips for better drinking water and plumbing.

A tiny crack in a nuclear reactor, skyscraper, bridge or dam can cause catastrophic consequences. The Minneapolis bridge collapse, which killed 13 people in 2007, is just one example of what can happen when structural integrity is compromised. Unidentified or underidentified structural damage in nuclear reactors can be cataclysmic. Inspection of critical systems such as nuclear reactors is complicated and time-consuming. Videos captured by an automatic crack detection system can easily misidentify small scratches or welds as cracks, so technicians must review videos frame by frame. It is a time-consuming process with opportunities for human errors.

Applications are invited for one postdoctoral position in the area of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University – West Lafayette, IN. The candidate will be jointly advised by Dr. Inez Hua and Dr. Hua Cai on developing big-data informed models on industrial water consumption. The application deadline is May 20, 2019.

On April 23, 2019, the College of Engineering recognized graduate students and faculty mentors who have received awards at the school, college, university, and national level over the past academic school year. Several CE graduate students received awards for research, teaching and service, and a CE faculty member was recognized as an outstanding mentor.