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One of the nation’s elite engineering departments.
The following graduate students received a $1,000 Kolodzey Travel Grant for the Spring 2016 semester. The award provides an opportunity for PhD students in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering to attend technical conferences, make oral and poster presentations about their dissertation research, and to develop a network of colleagues at other universities. Students are selected by a committee comprised of faculty from each area of specialization.
Spring 2016
- Konstantinos Belivanis - Structural Engineering
- Jinbo Chen - Geotechnical Engineering
- Pranav Karve - Mechanics, Uncertainty and Simulation in Engineering
- Kerry Kreitman - Structural Engineering
- Trevor Williamson - Infrastructure Materials Engineering
The following graduate students received a $1,000 Kolodzey Travel Grant for the Fall 2016 semester. The award provides an opportunity for PhD students in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering to attend technical conferences, make oral and poster presentations about their dissertation research, and to develop a network of colleagues at other universities. Students are selected by a committee comprised of faculty from each area of specialization.
Fall 2016
- Jongkwon Choi – Structural Engineering
- Zhe Han - Transportation Engineering
- Michael Levin – Transportation Engineering
- Nan-You Lu – Mechanics, Uncertainty and Simulation in Engineering
Major Josh Aldred (M.S. 2010, Ph.D. 2015) has been honored as the nation's top federal engineer with the 2016 Federal Engineer of the Year Award.
Sponsored by the National Society of Professional Engineers and Professional Engineers in Government, the award honors engineers employed by a federal agency that employs at least 50 engineers worldwide.
Aldred is currently serving as an operations flight commander at Kunsan Air Base in the Republic of Korea, where he is responsible for managing 170 military and Korean civil engineers. He oversees the maintenance of 1,083 facilities, encompassing 3.6 million square feet, in addition to the daily maintenance of the air base's $260 million airfield.
In recent years, Aldred defended his doctoral dissertation at The University of Texas at Austin, which was a systems analysis of evaluating the feasibility and monetary benefits of ozone control through the use of activated carbon filtration in buildings. In cooperation with the UT Energy Stewards and Environmental Health and Safety, his team was able to achieve considerable energy savings (~$50K per year) on a campus building and then re-invest some of the savings in improved filtration which lowered the indoor ozone concentration by an average of 45%.
“This was a win-win as we were able to simultaneously save energy and improve indoor air quality in the laboratories,” said Aldred. “Furthermore, this strategy can be used in other buildings on campus to save energy.”
Aldred also previously taught Civil and Environmental Engineering courses at the U.S. Air Force and has been deployed overseas three times.
“One of my most meaningful experiences in the military was leading a work training and education mission in Iraq called the Village of Hope,” he said. “We helped train 200 former Iraqi militiamen in construction trades to help rebuild their village, which was badly damaged after several battles with militants. In the course of starting up the training program, we noticed many of the men were illiterate, so we began a literacy program to help the men learn to read and write. It was a really fulfilling experience.”
When at home in his Austin community, he volunteers his time with nonprofit organizations providing food, counseling, job training, and housing assistance for the economically disadvantaged.
The award was presented on Feb. 26 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
Ph.D. candidate Trevor Williamson was selected to receive honors and a cash prize from the American Coal Ash Association Educational Foundation for his interests in advancing the sustainable and environmentally responsible use of coal combustion products (CCPs).
Williamson will receive a $5000 scholarship that was named in honor of David C. Goss, a former Executive Director of ACAA who was instrumental in establishing the Educational Foundation.
He was chosen from a field of applicants who submitted essays on topics related to the beneficial use of coal combustion products, which are materials produced when coal is burned to generate electricity.
The disposal of CCPs is costly for electric utilities, particularly in the face of new EPA regulations. Additionally, CCP landfilling is detrimental to the environment because it requires land use for disposal sites and risks soil and groundwater contamination by leachate. Investment in the right technologies, however, can turn these materials from a nuisance into a valued resource.
The concrete industry currently accounts for the majority of CCP reuse, where fly ash is used as a partial replacement for Portland cement. While typical replacement levels in ordinary concrete are about 25%, inorganic polymer concrete (IPC) provides an exciting possibility for substantially increasing CCP reuse by replacing 100% of cement with fly ash while achieving superior engineering properties in comparison to ordinary concrete.
Williamson’s research seeks to transform our ability to use IPC by advancing our understanding of the basic chemistry that controls its property development. He is supervised by Dr. Maria Juenger and is a graduate research assistant at the Laboratory for Infrastructure Materials Engineering.
Department Chair Richard Corsi has been selected as a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus at The University of California, Davis. He is one of five graduates from the UC Davis College of Engineering who is recognized with the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Medal (DEAM).
The recipients of this award are engineering graduates with 15 years or more of professional experience and who have contributed in a positive way to the reputation of UC Davis.
The DEAM consists of three categories; Excellence in Business, Excellence in Education, and Excellence in Public Service. Corsi is recognized for his Excellence in Education.
Corsi earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at UC Davis. He currently serves as the Chair of the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering (CAEE) at The University of Texas at Austin and is also the Co-Director of the UT Center for Sustainable Development.
He is the ECH Bantel Professor for Professional Practice, the 2015 recipient of UT’s William David Blunk Memorial Professorship, and a member of the prestigious UT Academy of Distinguished Teachers. His areas of expertise are indoor air quality; sources, fate, and control of indoor air pollution; homogeneous and heterogeneous indoor environmental chemistry; and human exposure to toxins in indoor environments.
The UC Davis College of Engineering will present its annual awards on February 20, 2016.
Environmental and water resources professor David R. Maidment elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Recognized for the development of geographic information systems applied to hydrologic processes.
Professor Chandra Bhat has been selected to receive the 2016 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. This award is given each year for outstanding achievements by an alumnus of IIT Madras.
Since the inception of the awards in 1996, there have been 123 distinguished alumni selected for this award from a total alumni population of over 42,000. Each year about 8-10 alumni are selected. The awards are presented during the Institute Day around in April each year.
Bhat currently serves as the Director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been at UT Austin since the Fall of 1997 and has since then received several awards, including being named to the Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2010, the 2008 Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award, and 2006 Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company Award for Excellence in Engineering Teaching.
Other awardees for 2016 include professors, CEOs, co-founders of companies, directors, and scientists from across the world.
Assistant Professor Raissa Ferron is recognized by Engineering News-Record (ENR) Texas & Louisiana as one of the 2016 Top 20 Under 40 winners. The winners were determined to be the best-of-the-best young construction professionals by an independent panel of judges.
Entries from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas were considered. Ferron is the only winner from academia.
Each year, the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Awards recognize the great teaching of undergraduates in the core curriculum. These recipients are UT Austin’s educational innovators whose commitment and performance not only instruct but inspire. Associate Professor Amit Bhasin was one of eight award recipients for 2015-2016.
Bhasin joined UT Austin as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering in the fall of 2008. Since then he has not only established a world-class research program in the area of infrastructure materials but has also focused on enhancing the undergraduate learning experience.
Bhasin created a virtual laboratory that provides students with a unique simulated laboratory testing experience that supplements their classroom learning. He was later selected by the National Academy of Engineering to present his work in the virtual laboratory at the Frontiers of Education workshop in 2014.
He was also a co-grantee of a competitive Curriculum Innovation Grant (CIG) at UT Austin to overhaul the freshman introductory course to civil engineering and to create a template that can be used and followed by other disciplines for their respective introductory courses.
In 2013, Bhasin was the recipient of the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award by the UT System Board of Regents.
The President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Awards are made possible by contributions from friends of the university known as the President’s Associates who are committed to the quality of educational programs at UT Austin.
