CE News & Spotlights

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."

Assistant Professor Brandon Boor's research on babies stirring up clouds of bio-gunk when they crawl has been featured as one of the top 10 Purdue research news stories of 2018.

Rebecca S. McDaniel, P.E., Ph.D., technical director at the North Central Superpave Center at Purdue University, has been elected to the board of directors of ASTM International, an international standards organization that develops and publishes voluntary consensus technical standards for a wide range of materials, products, systems, and services.

The Center for Security Research and Education (CSRE) at Penn State University has announced that Caitlin Grady (PhD 2015), assistant professor of civil engineering, has been selected as the center's inaugural Faculty Fellow. The fellowship will provide funding beginning in January 2019 for Grady’s security-related research.

Purdue civil engineering students took first place in the 2018 International Bridge Competition, tied with Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. The team consisted of undergraduate students Hassan Bin Ammar, Eshana Kolli, Ziyan Lu, Darryl Sexton, Tianlong Sun, Ertica Susanto, Charley Yang, and PhD student Kinsey Skillen. Support for the team was provided by Prof. Santiago Pujol, Associate Professor Ayhan Irfanoglu, and Visiting Professor Luis Fargier.

Debra "Deb" Burrow, David M. Rater, and Nadezhda "Nadya" Zyaykina were recognized as finalists for the 2018 College of Engineering Staff Awards of Excellence at the annual staff awards banquet held on December 7th. Nadya Zyaykina was named the recipient of the Professional Achievement Award.

One hundred thousand residents of Flint, Michigan, could use water only from bottles or filters during a years-long lead contamination crisis, which started when the city switched to a new drinking water source in 2014. As part of a class assignment that grew into a case study, Purdue University researchers found that during the first three weeks of the disaster alone, anywhere from 31 to 100 million bottles were generated as waste. This means that Flint should have been buried in plastic by the time the crisis ended in 2017.

On Dec. 11, Lyles Family Professor of Civil Engineering Chad Jafvert was inducted into the University's Book of Great Teachers - honoring outstanding teaching faculty who have demonstrated sustained excellence in the classroom. Held every five years, the induction ceremony will take place at 3:30 p.m. in Purdue Memorial Union's South Ballroom President Mitch Daniels and Provost Jay Akridge will speak at the event.

California's deadly Camp Fire is now 100 percent contained, but low humidity and strong winds in the state mean that wildfires could strike again. Unfortunately, better building materials and planning can only offer so much protection, says Julio Ramirez, the center director for the National Science Foundation's Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Network Coordination Office, and Purdue's Karl H. Kettelhut Professor of Civil Engineering.

As we approach the holiday season, Purdue Civil Engineering Professor and Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program Director John Haddock offers some advice for travelers.

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.

The spring 2018 issue of the Lyles School's Civil Engineering IMPACT magazine has been recognized by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP) with a gold MarCom award. The international contest recognizes outstanding achievement by creative professionals involved in the concept, direction, design and production of marketing and communication materials and programs.

A paper published by a PhD student and faculty in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering has garnered the Editors' Choice Award from Water Resources Research. The award is given to about 1% of published articles in any calendar year.

A paper published by faculty and grad students in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering has garnered the Editors' Choice Award from Water Resources Research. The award is given to about 1% of published articles in any calendar year.

Ron Klemencic (BSCE '85) has been selected to receive the 2019 OPAL award — presented by ASCE — for his innovation and excellence in civil engineering design. This year's OPAL leadership award winners will be honored at the 2019 OPAL Gala, March 14, in Arlington, VA.

The National Academy of Construction has elected Harold F. Force (BSCE 1973, MSCE 1974), president of Force Construction Company, Inc., and executive vice president of Force Design, Inc., as a member of its class of 2018. He was formally inducted on October 11 during the NAC annual meeting, held at the US Grant Hotel. The 2018 class includes 37 new inductees. More than 300 leaders were considered for the selective NAC election process.

In the coming weeks, 40 scooters will be distributed across Purdue's campus to begin a four-week research project on best practices for using e-scooters. The research project, called Jelly, is being led by Darcy Bullock, Purdue's Lyles Family Professor of Civil Engineering and director of the Joint Transportation Research Program, which is operated out of Purdue's Discovery Park.

Suresh Rao studies failure. Specifically, he examines failures of the infrastructure networks that provide critical services to cities. By examining breakdowns and recoveries in urban infrastructure, he and his team are learning how to design and operate cities better — and help urban communities become more resilient. Rao, Professor of Civil Engineering and the Lee A. Rieth Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering, views cities as complex systems, a conglomeration of engineered networks (utilities, power grids, roads), the institutions that manage them, and the communities that expect their demands to be met reliably and affordably.