News & Features

4th Annual Sustainable Dog House Challenge

Read more

A multidisciplinary group of engineers and scientists has discovered a new method for water filtration that could have implications for a variety of technologies, such as desalination plants, breathable and protective fabrics, and carbon capture in gas separations. The research team, led by Manish Kumar in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, published their findings in the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Read more

Anca-Cristina Ferche is the department's new Structural Engineering assistant professor.

June 19, 2019

Anca-Cristina Ferche will join the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in our Structural Engineering group in September 2020.

Ferche received her Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 2012. She is currently working on completing her Ph.D. in Civil and Mineral Engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada where she completed her Master of Applied Science in Structural Engineer in 2015.

Her research interests include analysis and performance assessment of deteriorated concrete infrastructure, nonlinear finite element analysis of reinforced concrete structures, advanced constitutive modeling and alkali-silica reaction effects on the behavior of reinforced concrete structures.

"I am thrilled to join the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. I look forward to contributing to its remarkable innovation-driven culture and to help address some of the complex challenges aging and deteriorating infrastructure pose in Texas and in North America," said Ferche.

Dr. Berkin Dortdivanlioglu is the department's new Mechanics, Uncertainty and Simulation engineering assistant professor.

June 19, 2019

Dr. Berkin Dortdivanlioglu will join the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in January 2020.

Dortdivanlioglu recently completed his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University where he also received his M.S. He received his bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey in 2013. 

He has been a graduate researcher in the Computational Micromechanics of Material Lab at Stanford University since 2013. His research primarily focuses on understanding smart materials, such as hydrogels, and harnessing structural and material instabilities observed in these complex media for emerging applications. Furthermore, he studies physical instabilities observed in soft and multi-functional materials by combining analytical, computational, and experimental approaches.

Dortdivanlioglu will be working within our Mechanics, Uncertainty and Simulation Engineering group and hopes to develop courses in areas such as stability of structures and mechanics of soft materials. His technical interest includes investigating dynamic shape-shifting and functional changes in soft natural materials, elucidating the complete interplay between responsive and multi-physics material with their stimuli as well as discovering new deformation modes and leveraging surface energetics and topology optimization for soft robotics. 

"It is a pleasure to join the esteemed department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin at such an exciting time. I eagerly look forward to starting a collaborative and interdisciplinary research program in the Mechanics, Uncertainty, and Simulation in Engineering group by integrating advanced experimental and computational techniques," said Dortdivanlioglu. 

Dr. Pawel Misztal is the department's new Building Energy and Environments engineering assistant professor.

June 6, 2019

Dr. Pawel K. Misztal will join the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in September 2019.

Misztal received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Edinburgh in 2010. He received his MSc in Analytical Chemistry and BSc in Chemistry and Physics from Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Poland.

He joins us from the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, UK where he has served as the Atmospheric Chemist/Physicist since 2018. From 2015 to 2018, Misztal worked as an Associate Specialist for the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the College of Natural Resources in the University of California at Berkeley where he was also a Postdoctoral Research Scholar from 2010 to 2015.

His technical interests are broad and include quantification of fluxes of volatile organic compounds (VOC) by eddy covariance at ecosystem (tower) and regional (aircraft) scales; understanding the fate, transformations and removal processes of gas-phase aerosol precursors to understand and quantify the role of VOCs for secondary organic aerosol formation; thinking holistically to understand the feedbacks between anthropogenic pollution, biogenic VOCs (BVOCs), and atmospheric chemistry, and their links to climate, food security and health; and interdisciplinary research to quantify the links between atmospheric chemistry (indoors and outdoors), environmental microbiome, and human health.

Misztal says, "I am truly delighted to join the outstanding department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin and am looking forward with excitement to interdisciplinary collaborations with the colleagues in and outside of the department to make a better world for the local and global community."