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Fernanda Leite, assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, was selected to attend the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium.
The Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) Symposium brings together some of the nation’s most engaged and innovative engineering educators to discuss pioneering technical work and research in various engineering fields and industry sectors to inspire a sustained dialogue on engineering education. FOEE faculty members are actively teaching in US engineering programs and have recently implemented significant innovations in their classes. Leite was chosen by NAE through a competitive selection process.
A faculty member since 2010, Leite received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. Her technical interests include information technology for project management, building information modeling, visualization, life-cycle information integration, collaboration and coordination technologies, and information technology-supported construction safety management.
Leite teaches courses on project management and economics, building information modeling (BIM) for capital projects, and construction safety. She has integrated project-based learning to all her classes, through course projects, industry mentorships, and interactive exercises.
“By attending the NAE Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium, I hope to exchange and gain knowledge on leading-edge research and innovation across a variety of engineering disciplines, especially with regards to information-technology supported engineering problems,” says Leite.
“It is always a great pleasure to interact with other individuals who are as passionate as I am about teaching,” she says. “I am excited for the opportunity to meet and learn with other engineering faculty in this year’s symposium. I look forward to hearing what others have been doing to innovate in the classroom and enhance student engagement.”
The two-and-a-half-day symposium will be held Oct. 25-28 at the National Academies’ Beckman Center in Irvine, California.
The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering is once again ranked in the top 10 in U.S. News & World Report's 2016 undergraduate program rankings, strengthening the department's position as one of the nation’s elite engineering departments.
The undergraduate program in Civil Engineering is ranked No. 6 and the Environmental/Environmental Health Engineering is ranked No. 5.
In addition, the Cockrell School of Engineering is ranked as the No.11 best engineering school in the country, and several of UT Austin’s engineering programs ranked in the nation’s top 10 for their respective programs, according to U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings released on Sept. 9.
View methodology at www.usnews.com/collegemeth.
Professor Kara Kockelman is part of a new $12 million research network aimed at building sustainable, healthy and livable cities. Funded by the National Science Foundation’s Sustainability Research Network program and led by the University of Minnesota, the project is the first of its size to focus on ways to reimagine infrastructure — energy grids, transportation systems, green spaces, and food and water systems — to create cities that are highly functional, promote the health of residents and the environment, and have that intangible "vibe" called livability that makes cities desirable places to live and work.
Kockelman is leading the project's transportation testbed and is on the project’s steering committee.
More information on the research network.
Over the past several decades, hundreds of glaciers in mountainous regions have been melting, leaving behind new glacial lakes. These lakes present a risk of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), an increasing risk for communities that reside downstream. Scientists and engineers are concerned about the high potential for extensive loss of lives and severe damage to transportation infrastructure, hydroelectric power facilities, and agriculture.
Professor Daene McKinney will serve as Principal Investigator of a 3-year $1.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study community-based approaches to reducing glacial lake outburst flood risks in Nepal. McKinney, an expert in sustainable management of water resources and developing management tools for glacial lakes, will also work with researchers from the University of Colorado and Arizona State University.
The NSF-funded research will capture unique knowledge of glacial lakes and the communities that live near them, sharing this with researchers and decision-makers who are challenged by similar problems in the U.S. and other locations affected by melting glaciers. The project will integrate in situ physical and societal observations with geospatial analyses, intensive glacial hydrology and outburst flood modeling, key respondents’ interviews, and community-level mappings and focus groups.
“This research will provide essential knowledge to local communities and other government levels to guide planning and development to minimize the risk of these high mountain lakes,” said McKinney.
For the past several years, McKinney has worked in Nepal and Peru to understand the impacts of glacial melting on the communities there. As part of the High Mountains Adaptation Partnership (HiMaP) team, he recently led a rapid-response mission where he conducted field-based assessments of the April 25 Nepal earthquake’s impact on the country’s potentially dangerous glacial lakes.
While other scientists around the world are performing similar research, a key distinction of the team’s work is collecting on-the-ground data rather than relying on satellite images, as well as working directly with locals affected by the problem.
The CAEE Legacy Campaign was established in 2013 to support graduate and undergraduate research. Thanks to gifts from alumni and friends, five students were named Legacy Fellows and Scholars in 2015.
Second-year civil engineering undergraduate Lauryn Altena is working with Dr. Lance Manuel to study strategies for mitigating urban heat island problems. The Urban Heat Island (UHI) involves the creation of elevated temperatures in urban spaces, sometimes up to 12 degrees °C higher than in nearby rural areas. Such increased temperatures have implications for peak energy demand, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, heat-related illnesses, and water quality. The UHI grows as cities and their associated infrastructure grow, and it is a problem that affects most of the world’s population daily.
Lauryn’s study will help to identify the variables that most significantly contribute to increased UHI while considering mitigations to address those effects in specific cities. “Specific variables that affect UHI include building design, building location, (close buildings can trap hot air), amount of impervious cover, and wind flow around structures.”
While it is generally agreed that surface modification is the cause of increased temperatures in urban areas, the particular ways in which factors like albedo, evapotranspiration, and canopy layer work together to produce a heat-generating system require still more study. Such research seeks to improve the performance and efficiency of infrastructure within cities.
Matthew Reiter is a civil engineering student skilled at uncovering the environmental impacts of transportation. Under the guidance of Dr. Kara Kockelman, Matthew will pursue a study of plug-in electrical vehicles (PEVs) to determine the degree to which they represent an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional passenger cars in Texas. His study will assess not only emissions but also the energy impacts of battery provision and other manufacturing processes required to produce PEVs.
Prior to initiating this project, Matthew worked for Dr. Kockelman as an Undergraduate Research Assistant, investigating the air quality implications of electric vehicle adoption. Over the course of the study, they were surprised to discover that despite Texas’ relatively “clean” power grid, emissions associated with electricity generation appear to be worse than those from conventional vehicles.
Sustainable transportation is at the heart of sustainable cities, and Matthew is keen to determine whether or not the future adoption of PEVs will fundamentally change energy consumption in cities. Matthew has also co-authored a paper with Dr. Kockelman about reducing “cold starts” (when the engine of a conventional vehicle is cold, and therefore requires more energy to start) and will present it at the Transportation Research Board’s Annual Meeting in January 2016.
Melvin Goh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. His research is dedicated toward the development of a practical computational tool that can be used to assess the performance of existing reinforced concrete slabs and shell structures that have been deemed deficient according to evolving structural design philosophies or are exhibiting signs of distress as a result of degradation associated with aging and deterioration. Melvin’s goal is to create a reinforced concrete modeling procedure that combines high-fidelity and low-cost modeling approaches to perform adequately detailed analyses for full structural systems with limited computational effort.
This type of system-level modeling procedure can be used to more efficiently model the performance of reinforced concrete slabs and shell structures under critical loading scenarios that cannot be realistically examined at the single-element or subassembly level. Examples of such applications include the progressive collapse resistance of reinforced concrete slab systems and the seismic performance of flat plate systems under earthquake ground motions. Practical computational tools that can provide reliable structural performance estimates will be invaluable in the coming years as the inventory of aging and distressed concrete infrastructure continues to grow. Melvin’s research is being carried out under the supervision of Dr. Trevor Hrynyk.
Nash Mock has been passionate about improving global environmental conditions since joining CISV International at age 11. Working with graduate student Aurore Mercelat and under the direction of Drs. Lynn Katz, Kerry Kinney and Frank Seibert, Nash is currently assisting with a research project involving the use of hollow fiber hydrophobic membranes to separate water/oil emulsions. Nash first became interested in undergraduate research in an Environmental Sampling and Analysis course taught by Dr. Katz.
The novel membrane process has been patented by UT researchers, and the group’s current research builds on previous studies examining its application to oil/water separation in biofuel production. Specifically, the focus of current work seeks to gain a more fundamental understanding of the process and to assess the potential of this process for separating oil/ water mixtures for other applications, including oil and gas industries and the cleanup of oil spills.
Nash is also optimistic that the development of a suitable membrane might also allow for the recovery of oil and its reuse in energy production (an attractive possibility, given its diminishing, non-renewable status).
Ethan Howley is an undergraduate civil engineering student with a passion for researching sustainable solutions to water purification and a deep interest in reconciling design and environmental necessity. “I am fascinated by the ways in which humans interact with the environment, and I want to find ways to improve the relationship.”
As an undergraduate researcher, Ethan currently assists on an EPA-funded project called the Water Innovation Network for Sustainable Small Systems (WINSSS) under the guidance of Dr. Mary Jo Kirisits and Dr. Michal Ziv-El. Ethan’s role in the collaboration is to monitor biological nitrification reactors and the micro-organisms that make them work. “Traditionally, nitrification has been done chemically. Biological nitrification could offer an advantage in reduced chemical costs,” says Ethan.
Nitrification is an important stage in the purification of wastewater. As sources of new water grow scarce, more cities will consider recycling treated wastewater to meet increased demand. Ethan is hopeful that additional research on the effectiveness of biological treatments to rid wastewater of contaminants like ammonia will ultimately provide more efficient drinking water solutions and contribute to the growth of sustainable cities.
More about The Legacy Campaign.
If you would like to create your own Legacy Fund to support student research, please contact Henna Tayyeb at
Nine alumni from the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin will be inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Alumni on October 16, 2015.
- Stacy J. Bartoletti (MS 93)
- Rajendra P. Bhattarai (MS 80)
- Erin J. Flanigan (MS 94)
- David T. Ford (BS 73, MS 75, PhD 78)
- Marek Jerzy Gromiec (MS 70)
- Julia M. Harrod (MS 94)
- Joseph R. Rapier (BS 81)
- William Bennett Ratliff (BS 83)
- Jose Holguin Veras (PhD 96)
The 2015 honorees are recognized for expertise in their fields, research and education advancements and strong leadership qualities.
The department established the Academy of Distinguished Alumni to acknowledge the professional achievements and contributions of its graduates. Twenty-seven charter members were inducted into the academy in 2003, and 84 additional members have been selected since.
Alumni, faculty and students are invited to attend the induction ceremony.
For more information, please contact
Alumnus Thomas W. Taylor (BS ArE ’59) and his wife, Dane (BBA ’75), have made a personal pledge to renovate the CAEE Architectural Engineering Suite. This gift will provide funding for a state-of-the-art design studio that teaches students the integration of architecture and engineering systems.
Defining the identity of the third floor, the new space will include glass wall views into the seminar room and student spaces. This will create a vibrant learning community where students can study, collaborate, and engage with faculty and classmates.
The construction of the new Engineering Education and Research Center (EERC) has triggered several significant renovations within Ernest Cockrell Jr. Hall (ECJ). Once complete, the EERC will operate as a connected neighborhood on the three lower levels of ECJ, which will include the architectural engineering design studio.
Department Chair Richard Corsi summarizes what this gift means to the State of Texas and the importance of architectural engineering as a profession. “Americans spend 70 of their 79 years of average lifetime inside buildings," he said. "It is critical that building environments are safe from structural or enclosure failures and designed to promote human health, productivity, and learning. These conditions are the responsibilities of architectural engineers. This wonderful gift from Thomas and Dane Taylor will benefit and inspire countless generations of architectural engineering students who will continue to define where we live our lives. Their generosity will have immediate and long-lasting impacts that benefit CAEE students and those who occupy the buildings they design and build.”
A longtime supporter of the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Taylor received his bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering in 1959. He has been a leader and innovator in the building industry throughout his 50+ year career as a structural engineer. Now a Principal Design Engineer at structural engineering firm Datum Engineers, he took over operations in 1963 and helped Datum grow into a nationally recognized firm.
Passion for design and architecture – the “Art of Structural Engineering” – has been Taylor’s signature. Projects such as Thanksgiving Square, the Ballpark at Arlington, the Chapel of St. Ignatius, EDS Headquarters, Parkland Memorial Hospital, Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Irving Convention Center, Dallas Convention Center and the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank have become Datum’s signature works.
“I have had many blessings in my life and have so much enjoyed my career as an architectural engineer,” Thomas said. “The two blessings that have made such an impact on my life, is my loving family and a public education at The University of Texas at Austin.”
The new studio will be named after Datum Engineers. The expected date of completion is March 2016.
More architectural engineering student renderings of design studio.
If you are interested in supporting the ECJ Renovation, please contact Henna Tayyeb at
A new cyberinfrastructure effort funded by a $13.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation will help engineers build safer structures that can better withstand natural hazards such as earthquakes and windstorms.
The Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin is leading the effort to build a software platform, data repository and tools that will help the United States design more resilient buildings, levees and other public infrastructure that could protect lives, property and communities.
Professor Ellen Rathje, an expert in earthquake engineering, will lead the UT Austin team, which will include aerospace engineering professor Clint Dawson, who brings hurricane modeling expertise, and TACC director Dan Stanzione, a leader in high-performance computing. The team is partnering with Jamie Padgett of Rice University, Jean-Paul Pinelli of the Florida Institute of Technology and researchers from other universities across the country.
The Cockrell School team will use analytics, storage, visualization and cloud technologies at the university’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to develop DesignSafe, a resource-sharing Web platform that will enable computer models and simulations of natural hazards that can be validated against real-world data, creating an easily accessible resource for natural hazards researchers across the United States.
“We are bringing together our expertise in engineering and information technology to develop the best tools to help engineers better understand the impact of natural hazards on our cities and infrastructure,” said Ellen Rathje, a civil engineering professor in the Cockrell School and principal investigator on the project. “There is tremendous potential to save lives and property through better engineering, design and planning. The platform we develop here will help engineers use data and simulation to improve the design and planning processes.”
The cyberinfrastructure grant is part of the NSF’s new Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) program. NHERI was created to enable research and educational advancements aimed at preventing natural hazard events from becoming societal disasters.
Collaborative engineering research is critical to making our buildings and lifelines resistant to earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes,” said Joy Pauschke, NSF program director for NHERI. “The NHERI cyberinfrastructure will help spur engineering advances and bring together the natural hazards research community with an accessible platform for sharing data, computational (or simulation) tools and other resources.”
A primary goal of DesignSafe is to enable engineers to inexpensively and efficiently run hazard simulations and create models to compare and evaluate different alternatives for a building, levee or other structure before selecting a design. Running large-scale simulations requires efficient, open-source computer codes. To meet this need, the DesignSafe team will incorporate open-source software systems into the platform, including the NSF-supported OpenSees program for earthquake engineering simulations, originally developed by UT Austin President Gregory L. Fenves.
Another key component of DesignSafe is that it will allow researchers to consider a holistic view of infrastructure construction. Researchers will be able to integrate not only data on types of materials, building costs and designs, but also societal data about residents living in and around infrastructure.
Additionally, the DesignSafe team will build a Reconnaissance Integration Portal that provides access to RAPID (NSF-funded Rapid Response Research) reconnaissance data, and a Developer’s Portal for users to innovate new capabilities.
“NHERI will empower us to bring together experiments, experimental data, computational simulation and field reconnaissance data in a single computational environment so we can make advances that could significantly impact our ability to create safer, stronger buildings,” Stanzione said. “The cyberinfrastructure will incorporate new innovation from the community over time.”
The team plans to launch DesignSafe during the next eight months. As part of the grant, DesignSafe will offer online training materials, virtual communities, hands-on education workshops and student competitions.
About NSF’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Program
The larger NHERI effort will create various shared-use research facilities that will replace the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation. From 2015 through 2019, NHERI will be a distributed, multiuser, national facility created to provide the natural hazards engineering community with access to research infrastructure (earthquake and wind engineering experimental facilities, cyberinfrastructure, computational modeling and simulation tools, and research data), coupled with education and community outreach activities.
Professor Robert B. Gilbert will receive a 2015 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor bestowed by the University of Texas System Board of Regents. It is one of the nation’s largest monetary teaching recognition programs in higher education, honoring outstanding performance in the classroom and dedication to innovation in undergraduate instruction.
In total, 11 faculty members from The University of Texas at Austin will receive the award, which honors outstanding performance in the classroom and dedication to innovation in undergraduate instruction. Two faculty, including Gilbert, from the Cockrell School of Engineering will be recognized. Christine Julien, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has also received this honor.
Each honoree will receive $25,000 and be recognized at ceremony Aug. 19 at the JW Marriott in Austin.
“There is nothing more important at a university than good teaching,” said UT Austin President Gregory L. Fenves. “I thank the UT System and Board of Regents for recognizing the work of these talented faculty members, and I thank the recipients — at UT Austin and across the UT System — for inspiring their students every day.
Established in 2008, the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Awards program recognizes educators who deliver the highest quality of instruction in the classroom, the laboratory, the field or online.
Faculty members undergo a series of rigorous evaluations by students, peer faculty members and external reviewers. The review panels consider a range of activities and other criteria in their evaluations including outstanding teaching, mentoring, personal commitment to students and motivating students in the classroom.
“These amazing educators are responsible for helping to prepare the next generation of great leaders,” said Paul Foster, chairman of the Board of Regents.
“With a total award of more than $1.9 million dollars this year, no other university system in the nation is making this kind of an investment in rewarding outstanding faculty. The efforts of these faculty members significantly enhance the educational experiences of our students, and the UT Board of Regents is pleased to have this opportunity to honor them.”
Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and a potter from the Navajo Nation are creating a nanomaterial-enabled ceramic filter to enhance economically challenged communities’ access to potable water.
The project began four years ago after assistant professor Navid Saleh was inspired by Judy Pasternak’s “Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed.” The book documents the toxic legacy of uranium mining in New Mexico and northeast Arizona, where mine tailings left behind during the 4-decades long uranium mining (1943-1986) contaminated the surface and groundwater of the Diné (the Navajos).
In 2013, Saleh led a team of National Science Foundation-funded students to the Navajo Nation and partnered with the Bureau of Land Management’s Abandoned Land Mine personnel to look at water contamination issues that impacted the Diné. From the groundwater sampled from the area, it was clear that the abandoned uranium mines and open mine pits pose serious threats to human health, safety, and the environment.
During an analysis of groundwater from the T’iisnázbąs area, the team discovered that there is 10 times more arsenic (110 micrograms per liter) in the water than the maximum recommended limit of 10 micrograms per liter.
“This is a big problem,” says Saleh. “If arsenic is present, there will be other contaminants.”
Saleh felt that it was his responsibility as an environmental engineer to develop a solution. Because clay and the art of pottery interconnect Navajo traditions and daily life, Saleh began researching ceramic filters and nanomaterials to treat contaminated water with his students and colleague, Professor Desmond Lawler.
Saleh’s work at the Navajo Nation builds on a recently defended dissertation of PhD student Anne Mikelonis (supervised by Professor Lawler). As part of her work, she studied the attachment and detachment of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) to and from ceramic water filters along with its antimicrobial effects at Pure Home Water, a filter factory located in Tamale, Ghana. Mikelonis also studied the attachment of AgNPs to aluminum oxide membranes used in municipal drinking water treatment plants in developing countries.
Saleh’s team is building on this body of work with Diné potter Deanna Tso to develop a point-of-use ceramic-based filter with multi-functional hybrid nanomaterials embedded within the ceramic casting. The researchers are currently creating testable coupons, working on a prototype, and investigating the modification of a design that is already in use by both industrialized and developing countries.
“Ancestral knowledge will be infused into state-of-the-art technology for water treatment,” says Saleh, “We felt that our clay and the glazing (coating that’s put on the clay) are not likely the same as would be found on the reservation area,” he says. “We felt that it would be best to work with local people who have acquired this ‘lifestyle knowledge’ from grandparents and ancestors, and that alone can make this technology appropriate for the area in concern.”
In 2014, Saleh presented a case study at the ACS National Meeting (March 2014, Dallas, TX) with students Lewis Stetson Rowles and Nirupam Aich, “Synthesis and characterization of carbonaceous nanomaterial-multimetallic hybrids for simultaneous removal of radioactive and organic contaminants: A case study on Navajo Nation."
Rowles, a master’s/PhD student and NSF Graduate fellow with a deep commitment to transformative water purification research, is also a highly skilled potter. Rowles is working on the synthesis of the functional nanohybrids with doctoral students Dipesh Das, Jaime Plazas-Tuttle, and Nirupam Aich at Saleh’s laboratory.
While researchers build the engineering aspect of the clay and work with Diné potters, they will also collaborate with students and faculty from San Juan College for the next several years.
“We’re looking for a long-term relationship in this community,” Saleh added. “The research will not only help the Navajo people but potentially many other communities due to its ability to be adjusted and tuned to serve water decontamination needs of other low-income populations across the globe.”
In 2019 and 2020, Saleh and his students plan to host two exhibitions and seminars; one in Santa Fe, NM, at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the other in Window Rock, AZ, at the Navajo Nation Museum.
