After leaving her home in Greece to study at Purdue, Vicky Keramida studied environmental engineering and took a giant leap to start her own international environmental engineering firm that is based in Indianapolis and 100 employees strong. "I think Purdue gave us the confidence that we could do anything we wanted," Keramida says.

Congratulations to Tariq U. Saeed, recipient of the 2019 College of Engineering Outstanding Research Award. The award recognizes excellence in graduate student research from across the College of Engineering. Tariq will be recognized at the Spring Graduate Student Awards luncheon through a certificate and a $2000 award.

Brandon Boor, Assistant Professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering, is the recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his research into the formation, growth, and phase state of organic nanoaerosols in indoor environments.

The Neil Armstrong Distinguished Visiting Fellows program begins in March, bringing highly accomplished and recognized scholars and practitioners to collaborate on work with engineering faculty and students. These professionals visit for several weeks a year over the course of three years. Among them are CE alumnus Dr. Andrea Rinaldo of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Dr. Randall Poston of Pivot Engineers consulting firm in Austin, Texas.

A paper by PhD student Irina Benedyk and Adjunct Professor of Civil Engineering Srinivas Peeta has received the 2018 Editor's Choice Award from the Springer journal Maritime Economics & Logistics.

Professor Jie Shan and cohort Charles Toth, Research Professor at Ohio State University, received the 2019 LiDAR Leader Award (2nd Place) from the International LiDAR Mapping Forum. They were recognized for their edited publication, Topographic Laser Ranging and Scanning.

Anne Bigane Wilson (BSCEM '79, MSCE '81), President of Bigane Paving Co., has been named recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award by the College of Engineering.

A Purdue University team, led by Civil Engineering Associate Professor Joe Sinfield, has developed a new method to detect the presence of certain hazardous solvents in water and soil.

Lisa L. Losada Rojas, PhD student at the Lyles School of Civil Engineering, has been awarded a $3,000 scholarship from the Women's Transportation Seminar (WTS) Greater Chicago Area chapter for the 2018-2019 academic year.

The American Concrete Institute has named Purdue University with the ACI Award for University Student Activities.

A recently published paper co-written by a group of researchers including Shirley Dyke, Santiago Pujol, and Julio Ramirez, has been selected by ASCE as the Editor's Choice.

Richard Lewis was one of the signers of a petition to allow "colored" children to attend public school in Greensburg, Indiana. Could he possibly have envisioned that he would have a son who would someday become Purdue University's first African American graduate?

William Baker, Structural Engineering Partner at SOM, will present this seminar in the 150 Years of Giant Leaps in Engineering series, on February 19th at 4:30 p.m. in Fowler Hall. Students are invited to a meet & greet with Mr. Baker earlier that day from 12:30-1:30 p.m. in Hampton Hall's Wood Commons.

The 105th Purdue Road School will be held March 4-7 on the Purdue University campus. This is a great Indiana tradition that brings together federal, state and local agencies, industry, consulting and academia to collaborate and reflect on diverse transportation topics. Over 3,000 attendees will have the opportunity to hear Opening Session and Luncheon keynote addresses from leaders in the transportation field, choose from nearly 200 hours of technical sessions, visit a variety of exhibitors, and network with their peers.

Kumares C. Sinha, Olson Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, has been recognized by Jadavpur University, India, at the commemoration of its 60th anniversary, as a Distinguished University Alumnus.

Shuai Li (PhD '17), Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, has been named the recipient of the ASCE Collingwood Prize for his paper entitled, "Integrating Natural Language Processing and Spatial Reasoning for Utility Compliance Checking," published in the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management.

Idling in a long highway line of slowed or stopped traffic on a busy highway can be more than an inconvenience for drivers and highway safety officers. It is one of the most vulnerable times for "secondary accidents," which often can be worse than an original source of the slowdown, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration. In fact, secondary crashes go up by a factor of almost 24 during the time that highway safety officials are assessing and documenting the crash site.

Sayan Dey, a PhD student in hydraulics and hydrology, has been selected as Purdue's 2018 Esri Development Center (EDC) Student of the Year for his work on "Watershed scale River Channel Morphology Model: An ArcMap tool for automated generation of river channel geometry."