Prof. Jan Olek, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, FACI has been named the first ACPA Scholar in Concrete Pavement and Materials Science effective August 12, 2013. He is a professor of Civil Engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, USA.  He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Cracow University of Technology, in Krakow, Poland, another M.S. degree from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. from Purdue University.  After completing his graduate studies he has held academic positions at the Colorado School of Mines and at Penn State University before returning (in 1994) to Purdue University.

 

Since joining Purdue University he has been actively involved in teaching undergraduate courses in engineering materials, graduate courses in corrosion of reinforcement, advanced concrete and aggregate, sustainable binders and experimental methods in construction materials research.  His research interests include properties and use of supplementary cementitious materials, durability of concrete and aggregates, high performance concrete and concrete recycling.  He has over 130 technical publications in scientific journal and conference proceedings and graduated 19 MS and 21 PhD students.

 

He is an active member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) where he served as the chair of the Durability Committee and the American Concrete Institute (ACI) where he served as a chair of the Research Committee.  He currently serves on the ACI Technical Activity Committee (TAC).  He is a recipient of several awards, including the Bength Frieberg Award for Best Paper from the International Society for Concrete Pavements and the Harter Rupert Best Paper Award from the TRB.  He has been elected the Fellow of the ACI (in 2001) and received ACI Delmar E. Bloem Award for Distinguished Service. He is a past associate editor of the ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering and is currently serving on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Pavement Research and Technology and Cement, Wapno, Beton.  He has been named the Distinguished Alumni of the Cracow University of Technology, elected Honorary Member of the Taiwanese Road Society and is the corresponding member of the Committee of Civil Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

 

The ACPA Scholar is a two-year appointment funded by the American Concrete Pavement Association.  The Indiana Chapter of the American Concrete Pavement Association created this position to support the Applied Concrete Research Initiative (ACRI) which is coordinated with the Joint Transportation Research Program at Purdue University’s School of Civil Engineering.  The goal of the Applied Concrete Pavement Research Initiative is to initiate and conduct field and applied concrete pavement research, in cooperation with the Indiana’s concrete pavement industry, Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), and Purdue University.  Field and applied concrete pavement research has become an important  issue in recent years as laboratory research, alone, cannot fully address current problems and needs of in-service pavement.  Field investigations, coupled with laboratory testing, are the keys to solving the in-service related problems associated with concrete pavement, toward making concrete pavement more cost competitive and durable compared to other pavement types.