Rao "G.S." Govindaraju, Bowen Engineering Head of Civil Engineering and Christopher B. and Susan S. Burke Professor of Civil Engineering, has been named a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Only 220 of ASCE's more than 150,000 current members can call themselves Distinguished Members.

Just by breathing or wearing deodorant, you have more influence over your office space than you might think, a growing body of evidence shows. But could these basic acts of existence also be polluting the air in the office room where you work? To find out, a team of engineers led by Assistant Professor Brandon Boor has been conducting one of the largest studies of its kind in the office spaces of a building rigged with thousands of sensors. The goal is to identify all types of indoor air contaminants and recommend ways to control them through how a building is designed and operated.

PhD student Takahiro (Taka) Yabe received 2nd place in the 2019 NetMob conference poster competition for his research titled, "Understanding post-disaster population recovery patterns."

The Schools of Civil Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering are planning to offer affordable online Master’s programs through edX with support from Kaplan Higher Education. This is the first comprehensive engineering post-graduate curricula provided online at less than $25K for master’s degrees. Purdue is ranked among the top ten engineering programs and top five online engineering graduate programs in the U.S.

PhD student Hemant Gehlot (advised by Dr. Satish V. Ukkusuri and Dr. Shreyas Sundaram) has been awarded an honorable mention as one of the three finalists for the Best Student Paper Award at the IFAC Workshop on Distributed Estimation and Control in Networked Systems (NecSys) 2019 for the paper entitled, "Approximation algorithms for the recovery of infrastructure after disasters under precedence constraints."

Congratulations to CE junior Amanda Lefebvre! The photo of her surveying Colquechata, Bolivia took 1st in the Purdue Global Engineering Programs and Partnerships Photo and Video Contest. Amanda is part of the Purdue EPICS Engineers Without Borders program that is working to design a water distribution system for the community. Additionally, students in the Purdue EPICS Global Air Quality Trekkers (GAQT) Nandi Clean Kitchen Study, led by Purdue CE Assistant Professor Brandon Boor took 1st and 2nd place in separate categories.

A new competition sponsored by the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering asks Purdue students to propose novel solutions to important unsolved societal problems. Prof. Babak Ziaie says the Ideas and Innovation Tournament Challenge (I2TC) is open to all Purdue students and simulates the experience of being an engineer entrepreneur. In the first phase of the tournament, students form teams consisting of at least one ECE undergraduate student. The teams then choose a topic for the challenge (i.e., aging, food safety, smart cities, energy efficiency, etc.) and develop a proposed solution.

PhD students Herta Paola Montoya Rodriguez and Samuel Park have been selected by the Purdue Systems Collaboratory for the Systems Fellow Program. The assistantship is meant to support outstanding graduate students who conduct research addressing a systems problem or advancing systems science.

Luna Lu, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, has recently been named the ACPA Scholar in Concrete Pavement and Materials Science by the Indiana Chapter of the American Concrete Pavement Association.

U.S. News & World Report has released its national rankings of undergraduate programs for 2019 with Purdue Civil Engineering ranked #5 in the nation. The undergraduate rankings are computed from the responses to a survey sent to deans, heads, and selected senior faculty. Purdue CE has been consistently ranked as a top 10 undergraduate program by U.S. News & World Report for over a decade.

A team of craftsmen from Steele Foundation LLC has been honored by the Washington Building Congress (WBC) with a 2019 WBC Craftsmanship Award for underpinning and shoring of Marriott's new Moxy Hotel at 11th and K Streets N.W. in downtown Washington, D.C. Steele Foundation LLC is owned and operated by a father-son tandem of Lyles School of Civil Engineering grads.

A research team, led by Associate Professor Luna Lu, is collecting data through sensors to track concrete strength development in real time. This data can be used to select optimal times to open up traffic following a construction project.

Transportation incidents like poor bridge or highway performance often leave drivers wondering if their local roads and bridges are adequate. A nationwide effort that began in Indiana and New York – and is now celebrating its 60th anniversary – aims to ensure the safety of local drivers. The Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) helps street departments, county highway departments and local elected officials to better meet the needs of the public by acting as a resource for training, technical assistance and technology transfer.

Purdue Civil Engineering alumnus Chris Burke (BSCE '77, MSCE '79, PhD '83, HDR 2010) has received the prestigious 2019 Ray K. Linsley Award from the American Institute of Hydrology. The award recognizes Burke’s many contributions to the science and practice of surface water hydrology and the impact he has had on numerous communities by finding environmentally friendly solutions to water management problems.

Congratulations to alumnus and Professor of Civil Engineering and Head of Construction Engineering and Management Makarand Hastak (PhD '94) on being named the Dernlan Family Head of Construction Engineering and Management.

Matthew H. Hebdon, P.E. (Ph.D. 2015), assistant professor in the Charles Edward Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Virginia has been named the recipient of the 2019 Robert J. Dexter Memorial Award Lecture. The program provides an opportunity for individuals early in their careers in structural engineering to present a lecture on their steel bridge activities to the Steel Bridge Task Force and to participate in its semi-annual three-day meeting.

In 2017, Purdue University researchers helped discover a lava tube on the moon that could protect astronauts from hazardous conditions on the surface. Now, 3D image reconstructions of lava tubes on Earth could help assess if they are stable enough to build human habitats. The work is part of Purdue's Resilient ExtraTerrestrial Habitats (RETH), a group that researches how future human habitats on the moon or Mars can be made resilient against hazards like radiation, temperature fluctuations, seismic activity and meteorite impacts. Lava tubes could be part of the solution.

Samuel Labi, Professor of Civil Engineering and Associate Director of the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT), delivered a keynote lecture titled, "Preparing Our Infrastructure for Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Operations: Challenges and Opportunities," at the 2019 International Conference on Smart Cities in Seoul, Korea on July 17, 2019.

Kevin Fitzpatrick, PE (BSCE '85) has been selected to serve as the next President and CEO of Benesch. He will assume the role in September of 2020. Kevin is currently an Executive Vice President and serves as the company's Great Lakes Regional Manager, overseeing operations and business development for the Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Railroad Divisions. Kevin has played an integral role in shaping Benesch throughout his tenure with the company.

Purdue civil engineering alumnus Tien Fang Fwa (PhD '85), Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore, has been elected to the Singapore Academy of Engineering.