2014-2015 CEEatGT Annual Report

2014–2015 ANNUAL REPORT

PEOPLE ARE OUR PRIORITY. THE WORLD IS OUR LABORATORY.

Cover: A researcher stands among the last patches of ice atop Chacaltaya Mountain’s 18,000-year-old glacier. Soaring over the Bolivian landscape, the peak once served as the world’s highest lift-served ski slope but has since closed due to recurring seasons of limited snowfall. Some of our students discovered this remote location during a research trip to Bolivia. Read about their journey on page 29. Read one engineer’s thoughts on climate change and ethical engineering on page 3.

Photo by Heidi Vreeland.

Annual Report: JULY 2014 – June 2015 LEADERSHIP Reginald DesRoches, Ph.D. Karen and John Huff School Chair and Professor Donald R. Webster, Ph.D., P.E. Associate Chair and Professor James A. Mulholland, Ph.D. Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and Professor Susan E. Burns, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs and Georgia Power Distinguished Professor Adjo A. Amekudzi-Kennedy, Ph.D. Associate Chair for Global Engineering Leadership and Research Development and Professor

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology 790 Atlantic Drive N.W. Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0355 communications@ce.gatech.edu www.ce.gatech.edu P / 404 / 894 / 2201 F / 404 / 894 / 2278 Joshua Stewart Writer & Editor Jess Hunt Designer & Photographer Christi B. Tillery Director of Development 404 / 894 / 2772 christi.tillery@ce.gatech.edu

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return on investment

undergraduate civil engineering

undergraduate en v iron m ental en gineerin g

g raduate en v iron m ental en g ineerin g

g raduate c i v il eng ineerin g Twitter + Facebook + Instagram: @CEE at GT ////////// www.ce.gatech.edu Academic rankings: U.S. News & World Report, 2015/2016. ROI: for Georgia Tech, according to Payscale.com’s 2015 assessment of annual return on investment for public colleges.

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e say all the time that “people are our priority” and “the world is our laboratory.” What does that mean?

In these pages, you’ll find example after example of how our engineers — faculty, students, alumni — are improving the built environment to better the lives of people around the globe. Whether it’s testing air and water quality in Bolivia or developing ways to safeguard buildings in earthquakes, we take seriously our responsibility to create the framework for a society with an improved quality of life.

The world is our laboratory? That stretches from east Africa to Florida or California to Antarctica, from our home in metro Atlanta to Europe, Asia, the Middle East. We go where our skills are needed and where our questions can find answers. Sometimes that means we’re digging up layers of sand on an oil-fouled beach. We’re patrolling the tides off the southeastern coast. Or we’re tracking city buses to improve how they’re scheduled.

Those two ideas also mean we bring all of that back home to Atlanta to offer unique opportunities for our students — like listening to one of the brightest engineering minds of our time talk about climate change or developing an entire curriculum on what it means to be an engineering leader in this global community. That’s what we’ve done with our exciting new minor in Global Engineering Leadership, which debuts this fall. Students who pursue the minor will study with leading experts and learn the skills they’ll need to lead in a global context. It’s one more way we’re distinguishing our graduates and preparing them to make a difference in the world.

Of course, so much of what we do is made possible by the generous support of our alumni and friends.

They make it possible for our students to learn in state-of-the-art classrooms, to travel the world, and to conduct science in the finest research labs. We’re grateful for their role in our accomplishments.

You can read about all of this, and more, in these pages, and I hope you will. I’m proud of the incredible things our people have done to advance science and improve the world over the last 12 months. Of course, this is only a snapshot of what we’re up to, so I encourage you to check in with us on our all-new website and across the web via our social media feeds. Or come visit us on campus and see first-hand.

You’ll be amazed at what’s happening around here. I certainly am.

Thanks for your support. Go Jackets!

Reginald DesRoches, Ph.D. Karen and John Huff School Chair and Professor School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology ii

Salutation

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EXPLORATION

FACTS & FIGURES...........i

Challenge Accepted: Leadership.......................1

Spring Break Among the Alpacas: Students research air and Water quality in Bolivia.......29

WELCOME.....................ii

Climate change & Ethical engineering.......3 Building for the Future....5 Research In CEE at GT: Questions & Answers.....7

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Photo by Kaitlyn Long.

Destination: Brussels.........47 In their own words: Students’ travel experiences.............48

CONVERSATION

ANNOTATIONS

The Engineer as Artist...................57

By The Numbers.......71

Drawing Parallels......................59

Student News........73

Big Ideas & Tiny Data.......................61

Faculty News........75

Where the Research Meets The Road.......63

OUR Faculty........77

The Cracks At Crystal River..........65

Alumni News............79

Keeping Campus Clean & Green...............67

CEE at GT EXTERNAL ADVISORY BOARD. . . . . . 80

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Challen g e A c c epted : LEADERSHIP N ew Global E n g ineerin g L eadership

Minor tea c hes students about g lobal issues, ethi c s, proble m - solv in g

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hat does it take for a young engineer to become a leader who solves some of the biggest challenges facing society?

A grasp of global issues, to start with, along with cultural literacy, ethical foundations, and the ability to relate to people, according to the minds behind a new minor for Georgia Tech engineers.

Created and housed within the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Global Engineering Leadership minor launches officially in the fall with the rollout of a brand new course taught by Karen and John Huff School Chair Reginald DesRoches and Georgia Tech President Emeritus Wayne Clough.

The course, Global Engineering Leadership and Management, will also tap into the experience and insight of industry leaders – many of them CEEatGT alumni – who will co-teach and help ground the course in the real world.

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“Given the rapid pace of globalization, and its impact on the engineering profession, this minor is more important than ever,” DesRoches said. “The students in this minor will be exposed to some of the most challenging problems facing the world and some of the leading thinkers in the field.

“I hope that our students will strongly consider participating in the program. It will be something that they enjoy, and it will make them more marketable when they leave our program.”

Along with other initiatives in the School, the minor responds to the call from the National Academy of Engineering to educate a new kind of engineer for the 21st century, a “world-class engineer,” said Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy, associate chair of global engineering leadership and research development.

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“A world-class engineer has very good problem-solving skills, is knowledgeable about global issues, is an effective communicator, is ethically and culturally competent, and can lead in the business, public service and humanitarian sectors.

“The world is increasingly in need of such engineers: Engineers who understand the social implications of their decisions and can help develop high-performance cities and sustainable communities over the course of their lifetimes. Engineers who can rise to leadership positions to help shape the future,” Amekudzi-Kennedy said.

Students pursuing the minor also take a course focused on the foundations of leadership and complete an international engineering internship. Other classes planned for the coming academic year will focus on constructing megaprojects, sustainable transportation in other countries, and evaluating the impact of disasters around the world.

Faculty members have already been offering courses that can be included in the minor for interested students, including an Environmental Technology in the Developing World class that traveled to Bolivia in the spring. (Read more about that trip and the impact on the students on page 29.)

The minor builds on a tradition of student leadership, collaboration, and service.

Above, the Georgia Tech chapter of Engineers Without Borders discusses educational initiatives and implementation of a solar-powered well with the Mungoa-Goa, Cameroon Development Association.

Completed 2009-2014, the initiative marked the chapter’s first official project. Photo courtesy of EWB-GT.

“ T he world is in c reasin g ly in need o f su c h en g ineers : E n g ineers who understand the so c ial i m pli c ations o f their de c isions and c an help de v elop hi g h - per f or m an c e c ities and sustainable c o m m unities o v er the c ourse o f their li f eti m es.

“ T he students in E n g ineers who c an rise to leadership positions to help shape the f uture .”

The Global Engineering Leadership minor is co-administered by Georgia Tech’s Leadership Education and Development office as part of the minor in leadership studies. Learn more about the program at ce.gatech.edu/leadership

this m inor will be exposed to so m e o f the m ost c hallen g in g proble m s fa c in g the world and so m e o f the leadin g thin k ers in the f ield.”

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LEADERSHIP

Climate

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Change

Ethical

I nau g ural H yatt le c turer

Engineering

Wayne Clough says we must design and build for a new paradigm

#GTHYATT

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eorgia Tech President Emeritus Wayne Clough said engineers have an ethical responsibility to plan for climate change in the first-ever Hyatt Distinguished Alumni Leadership Lecture this spring.

Clough, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from Tech, said he knows climate change can be a controversial subject. But his message is that engineers can’t ignore the potential impacts and they shouldn’t stand aside and let others make decisions for them.

“If engineers are doing their jobs, they are thinking about how their designs relate to the future, and often long into the future,” Clough said. “They have a stake in the effects of climate change, both from the point of view of mitigation or slowing its potential effects, and adaptation, designing to help protect society from the effects that will occur.

And because there is no simple solution, engineers need to understand and become articulate about the issues.”

Clough’s lecture reflected his tenure as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, where he had the opportunity to spend time with scientists around the world and see first hand the significant changes occurring in natural systems. He also used his background as an engineer who has been asked to design for the effects of climate change and to help create national policy working on the National Science Board and with the National Academy of Engineers.

The speech marked the beginning of a semi-annual lecture series in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering supported by alumnus Kenneth Hyatt, B.S. 1962.

“This [speech is] important, because it’s my alma mater, it’s my home department,” Clough said. “I believe Ken Hyatt has supported this lecture series in the hopes speakers will be thought-provoking.”

For his part, Hyatt said he created the series so students can hear

from some of the School’s many accomplished alumni — people who have shown wisdom, insight and leadership.

“There’s a lot of value in exposing the students in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering to people who have made a contribution to society and have done well in their field,” said Hyatt, who also has a master’s in industrial management from Georgia Tech.

The lectures also are designed to appeal to other alumni and students throughout Georgia Tech.

“The speaker series will bring some of our most notable alumni leaders to speak and interact with CEE students, faculty and the broader Georgia Tech community,” said Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy, associate chair for global engineering leadership and research development. “It will expose our students to leaders in industry, academia, government and the not-for-profit sector. We’re grateful to Ken Hyatt for endowing this series.”

Watch Clough’s entire lecture and find links to further reading: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport Opposite page: President Emeritus Wayne Clough, B.S. 1964, M.S. 1965, (left) with alumnus Kenneth Hyatt, B.S. 1962, MSIM 1966. Photo

by Zonglin Jack Li. Left: Following the lecture, Clough spoke with students, including post-doctoral fellow Shahrzad Roshankhah. Photo by Jess Hunt.

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LEADERSHIP

uilding for the Future

T e c h ’ s under g raduate B uildin g Constru c tion Mo v es to C E E a t G T

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he School of Civil and Environmental Engineering begins an important new chapter in its century-long history this fall when Georgia Tech’s undergraduate building construction curriculum officially becomes part of the civil and environmental engineering program.

With the change, all undergraduates who wish to study building construction will earn a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, marrying the technical excellence the School is known for with a broad array of courses specifically tailored to construction engineering and management careers.

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“If you want to be part of the construction industry, you have to do it within the context of the civil and environmental engineering program, which, I think is a good thing,” said Reginald DesRoches, Karen and John Huff School chair. “In addition to getting the technical depth of a civil engineering degree, students will have an opportunity to get the breadth classes that are important for working in the construction industry.”

Those courses will include construction management, construction law, accounting, and real estate — classes that, traditionally, have not been

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offered within the School. The construction program’s shift strengthens the bonds between the School and its partners in Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture, combining the academic forces of the two units to provide a program rich in experience and fundamentals taught by faculty from both areas: Baabak Ashuri, Daniel Castro, Yong Cho, Russell Gentry and Iris Tien among them.

Construction industry leaders said the consolidated program will better serve students and give companies a single source of highly qualified, well educated new talent from Georgia Tech.

“The overall strength, in terms of size, ranking, etc., of the CEE program is a huge advantage for students looking for jobs,” said Brent Reid, CEO of Atlantabased Winter Construction and a member of the advisory board for the School’s construction program. “The rigor of the CEE program is known throughout the industry. This is a big advantage.”

to practice construction engineering and management.”

“We hear from industry leaders all the time that they like students to have a technical background, an engineering background, in their coursework,” DesRoches said, “while also having the other classes that are specifically important

“You want to understand how reinforced concrete and steel structures work, how buildings operate, what allows a building to stand up, how these things are constructed. Those are the technical aspects that are part of the basis of a civil and environmental engineering degree,” he said.

DesRoches said students who graduate from the program will be well served with a foundation in the broader areas of civil and environmental engineering, including structures, water, geotechnics, transportation, and environmental issues.

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“ T he ri g or o f the C E E pro g ra m is k nown throu g hout the industry. T his is a bi g ad vanta g e .”

The fall marks the end of a three-year transition for the building construction program, ensuring that all current students could finish their studies unaffected by the changes.

Photo by Fitrah Hamid.

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Q&

& Research

Donald Webster, left, and post-doctoral scholar Deepak Adhikari with the special rig they designed and built to capture the motion of a tiny marine mollusk called a pteropod. They had to take their setup to the far extremes of the planet, Antarctica, to study the animals in their native habitat. Photo by Gary Meek. Learn more: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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What can a tiny mollusk teach us about propulsion : and climate change?

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The tiny pteropod, a sea snail about the size of a pepper grain, is starting to reveal its secrets to Georgia Tech scientists.

They traveled to Antarctica, at the bottom of the world, in hopes of better understanding how climate change-induced ocean acidification will affect these animals at the base of the food web.

“It’s similar to the way we’ll send a canary into a coal mine to check the air,” said Jeannette Yen, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design. “We can find out a lot about how sick the ocean is by studying how these organisms move.”

Yen and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Donald Webster are leading the National Science Foundationfunded project. They collected organisms in the frigid waters off Antarctica and used a specially built rig to film their movements and the water motion surrounding the animal. Now they’re analyzing mountains of data — and uncovering some surprises.

“Pteropods are acting in a way that most zooplankton don’t act. The pteropods are actually using a lift-based propulsion,” Webster said. “Insects would be the closest analogy. It’s fascinating: Instead of swimming, they’re doing something much more analogous to flying.”

The organisms have “wings” (parapodia, scientifically speaking) that they “flap” to propel themselves through the water, similar to the flight of small insects like fruit flies.

“What it tells us is that there’s something going on called ‘convergent evolution,’” Webster said, “meaning that these aquatic and terrestrial organisms diverged approximately 550 million years ago, but they’ve found a very similar propulsion mechanism in these quite different habitats.”

And it’s incredibly efficient, Webster said.

“As they flap down in what we call their power stroke, they actually rotate so far that the wings get put into a position that when they do their recovery stroke, the recovery stroke is also in the downward direction.

They get upward lift on both power stroke and recovery stroke.”

Now collaborators at Johns Hopkins University are starting to take the data from the Antarctica trips to create computer models of how the creatures swim. That will allow the team to predict what will happen as the organisms’ shells change as a result of increased CO2 concentration in the ocean.

“Ultimately, we want to understand the effects of ocean acidification, and the modeling aspect really allows us to address the consequences of what would happen if you changed the shell weight and composition.”

By Joshua Stewart with contributions from Brett Israel and Kathleen Moore INNOVATION

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Can Alabama, Florida and : Georgia find a way to share water?

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A grassroots group of stakeholders in the three-state battle over water from the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint rivers released a consensus water management plan for the basin in May 2015, thanks in good measure to work by Professor Aris Georgakakos and his team.

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Five years in the making, the plan will be shared with the governors of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, as well as with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in hopes of ending two decades of fighting.

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Georgia Water Resources Institute (GWRI) performed much of the data-collection and assessment work for the ACF Stakeholders (ACFS) group, including cutting-edge modeling of the river.

“This detailed modeling allowed stakeholders to analyze the current basin conditions

and the impact of numerous water management alternatives — changes such as [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] water control operations or raising reservoir levels or increased consumptive use,” said Brad Moore, chair of the ACFS technical oversight and coordination workgroup. “The insights gained from these model runs allowed the ACFS to develop recommendations that will be made to the [Corps of Engineers], state and federal agencies, and private enterprises that will benefit the basin.”

“GWRI’s technical assessments led to detailed water management recommendations that form the basis of the ACF Stakeholders’ agreed-upon management plan,” said Georgakakos, GWRI’s director. “GWRI demonstrated that more proactive reservoir regulation and water/energy management strategies can mitigate water stresses during droughts and increase basin-wide benefits during wetter hydrologic periods.”

By Joshua Stewart

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The left fork of the Soque River, tucked within the Chattahoochee National Forest. The confluence of the Soque and the Chattahoochee River is about 60 miles northeast of Atlanta, Georgia, among the headwaters of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Watershed. Photo by Jess Hunt. Learn more: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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This is an example of the kind of improved latrine officials are building for the community of Maputo, Mozambique. Photo by Aaron Bivins. Learn more: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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Q

Does better sanitation : mean healthier children?

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Does

providing some sort of improved latrine for children in developing countries actually improve their health?

That means something other than a public or shared latrine, a bucket, or simply an open pit, the kind of facilities millions of people around the globe use each day.

The obvious answer would seem to be “yes.” But the truth is, we don’t have the hard science to prove it.

That’s why School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. student Jackie Knee and assistant professor Joe Brown are working in Maputo, Mozambique: they’re hoping to provide a clear answer for the first time to what amounts to a milliondollar question. Their trial, in an urban area and testing sanitation systems that are decentralized, is the first of its kind.

“One of the primary goals is to provide data to the government that [evaluates whether] this intervention — building these improved shared latrines in urban areas — has a positive impact on child health, meaning that as a result of this intervention, children are less sick,” Knee said.

The study could change lives.

The decentralized sanitation that is its focus is the most common form of human waste disposal in the world, even in cities.

“If we can provide data that says yes, this works, or no, this doesn’t work, then governments can make more informed decisions about whether this is a worthwhile place to spend money,” Knee said. “It’s not just the government of Mozambique; we’re hoping that this might be generalizable to many different major cities [in the developing world].”

By Laura Mast

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What’s discoloring the Taj Mahal?

The Taj Mahal’s iconic marble dome and soaring minarets require regular cleaning to maintain their dazzling appearance, and scientists now know why.

Researchers from the United States and India are pointing the finger at airborne carbon particles and dust for giving the gleaming white landmark a brownish cast.

Knowing the culprits in the discoloration is just the first step in cleaning up the Taj Mahal.

Scientists now must determine where the particles are coming from to develop strategies for controlling them.

“Our team was able to show that the pollutants discoloring the Taj Mahal are particulate matter: carbon from burning biomass and refuse, fossil fuels, and dust – possibly from agriculture and road traffic,” said Michael Bergin, a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

By John Toon

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“We have also been able to show how these particles could be responsible for the brownish discoloration observed.”

Beginning in the 1970s, observers noted a brownish cast to the white marble that makes up the Taj Mahal’s structures. Today, routine cleaning, including the painstaking application and removal of a clay material, maintains the brightness of the marble. Air pollution had been suspected as the culprit responsible for the discoloration, but no systematic study had been done and the specific components of the air pollutants responsible for the discoloration and the mechanisms by which they discolor the surface had remained unknown.

“Some of these particles are really bad for human health, so cleaning up the Taj Mahal could have a huge health benefit for people in the entire region,” Bergin said. “The health of humans and the health of the Taj Mahal are intertwined.”

Workers painstakingly clean the white marble of the Taj Mahal. Michael Bergin and his colleagues can finally point to what’s causing the browning of the iconic structure: airborne carbon particles and dust.

Photo by Michael Bergin. Learn more: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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The Georgia Tech pool was one of several tested by researchers to find out what kinds of chemicals are present in public pools.

Photo by Rob Felt. Learn more: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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Q A

Just what’s in that : swimming pool water?

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When the weather warms and you dive into a public pool to cool off, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering researchers have found you’ll be swimming with more than your fellow bathers.

Think: small amounts of pesticides, flame retardant and even caffeine.

The concentrations are nowhere near dangerous levels, but the researchers say their presence is worth noting.

“The findings highlight the need for people to bathe before swimming and avoid urinating in pools,” said Professor Ching-Hua Huang, co-author of the study.

“We also think that the practice of allowing pool water to recirculate for months or longer will allow some compounds to accumulate.”

Huang and Professor Ernest Blatchley at Purdue University tested three indoor swimming pools — at universities in

Georgia and Indiana and at an Indiana high school. They found measurable levels of DEET, the main ingredient in many insect repellants, as well as caffeine and TCEP, a flame retardant.

The authors note that DEET is mostly likely rinsed off swimmers’ skin when they enter the pool.

“Caffeine could be introduced by human excretions (e.g., urine and sweat),” they wrote, “but the route of introduction of the flame retardant TCEP is unclear.”

“Other externally applied medications or other topical agents (e.g., lotions, perfumes and cosmetics, which were not investigated in this study) may also be expected to enter pools via a similar pathway,” Huang and her co-authors wrote. “The effects of introduction of these chemicals into pools are largely undefined but may merit investigation.”

By Joshua Stewart

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How did a big-box retailer change Davis, California?

When Target proposed opening a 137,000 square foot store in Davis, California, some residents worried their city’s culture and economy was headed for disaster.

It was to be the first-ever “big-box” retailer in a city known for very strict planning guidelines that had kept such stores out of the community. And its arrival would lure shoppers away from locally owned downtown stores, they reasoned, not to mention violate the city’s sustainability efforts and culture.

But that doesn’t seem to have happened, according to a study by School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Patricia Mokhtarian and colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Arizona State University.

“Target did not mean the end of life as we know it in Davis,” they wrote. “The store added to the shopping options available to residents, and it lowered overall greenhouse gas emissions without seriously harming downtown.”

By Joshua Stewart

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What Mokhtarian and her co-authors found in surveying residents before and after the Target opened was that people did shop there, but not necessarily at the expense of downtown stores. And since they weren’t traveling nearly 18 miles outside of Davis to shop at other stores as often, they were actually driving less each month.

“After Target opened, average monthly shopping [vehicle miles traveled] declined from 98.4 to 79.5 per person, a drop of nearly 19 miles per month per adult age 25 or over,” Mokhtarian and her colleagues noted.

Those reductions did mean people took fewer trips people to downtown retailers after the Target store opened, but it was a relatively small drop, the researchers said.

“Given the mix of stores downtown, most shopping trips for Targettype items were not to downtown even before Target opened,” the researchers wrote.

“In other words, Target is not a good substitute for downtown shopping.”

Photo by Jess Hunt. Learn more: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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This ditch dug by Kostas Konstantinidis and Markus Huettel shows the layers of oil that remain in the sand on this beach in Pensacola, Florida. The research team found the oil led to the growth of a succession of microbes that broke down portions of the oil over time. Photo courtesy of Markus Huettel. Learn more: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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How do microbes clean : up oil-soaked beaches?

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When oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill first began washing ashore on Pensacola Municipal Beach in June 2010, populations of sensitive microorganisms began to decline.

At the same time, organisms able to digest light components of the oil began to multiply, starting the process of converting the pollutant to carbon dioxide and biomass.

Once the lightest fractions of the oil had been consumed, the organisms that had been digesting those compounds declined, replaced by others able to chew up the remaining heavier materials. Ultimately, a year after the spill, the oil had mostly disappeared and microbial populations buried in the beach sands looked much like they had before the spill, though there were as-yet unexplained differences.

That’s the scenario observed by scientists who have studied the oil’s impact on the complex microbial communities on this one Gulf Coast beach using advanced genomic identification techniques.

“We have identified which organisms and which genes are important at every stage of the biodegradation

process on the beaches,” said Kostas Konstantinidis, an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Beach communities contain hundreds of different microbes, and as many as 20 percent of them responded to the oil, Konstantinidis said. Those organisms for which the oil was toxic declined dramatically when the oil began reaching the beaches, but had mostly returned a year later.

“When we looked at the microbial communities a year after the spill and compared them to what we saw before the spill, we saw differences, but the communities were very similar to what we saw before the oil arrived,” he said. “You could tell confidently that the system had recovered, but it was not exactly the same community or same state. That’s something we’d like to study further and examine on other beaches.

“It took almost a year for the oil to disappear,” Konstantinidis said. “We want to know what are limiting factors for the process that might be addressed.

These microbes can take a long time, so if we can figure out how to make the process faster, it would be very helpful.”

By John Toon INNOVATION

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How can we make older buildings earthquake safe?

Non-ductile reinforced concrete buildings are among the most common structures in the United States.

They’re also among the most deadly. Built prior to the 1950s in California and prior to the 1980s in the central and southeastern United States, they typically weren’t designed to perform adequately during earthquakes.

“Their reputation comes from the fact that there are so many of them and they are brittle, which means they will not have a lot of bend before they fail and collapse,” said Reginald DesRoches, Karen and John Huff Chair and professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He’s leading a National Science Foundationfunded study testing retrofits that could make these buildings safer and more secure.

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To do that, DesRoches and his colleagues constructed a fullscale reinforced concrete building to see how it reacts during simulated earthquakes. This testing shakes the structure, allowing researchers to assess different retrofitting techniques.

Researchers hope to give building owners new options at a variety of price points and levels of intrusiveness to make their buildings safer. Some of these options, like a shape-memory alloy brace, have never been tested before. Others have been tested, but not like this.

“Nobody has really tested anything at this scale the way we are testing it with a large-scale shaker on top of the building,” DesRoches said. “From a technical perspective, this is very unique.”

By Matt Nagel

These reinforced concrete buildings in Haiti collapsed during a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in January 2010. Researchers at Georgia Tech, led by Reginald DesRoches, have been testing a series of innovative retrofits designed specifically for these kinds of buildings, thousands of which exist across the United States. DesRoches and his team constructed a two-story building and recreated the effects of earthquakes to assess the performance of their reinforcing techniques. Photo by Reginald DesRoches. Learn more: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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Researchers test a prototype tidal turbine near the coast of Savannah, Georgia. They used this pontoon-boat-mounted rig to zero in on the most efficient design for the turbine’s blades. Photo courtesy of Kevin Haas. Learn more: ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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Q A

How are the Girl Scouts helping : turn tides into electricity?

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The Girl Scouts are considering building an “eco-village” on an island they own along Georgia’s coast, and they want to harness the ebb and flow of the tide to power it.

They’ve turned to Kevin Haas to help. His research group is developing a turbine that could be placed just off the banks of Rose Dhu Island in the Little Ogeechee River, generating enough power for the Girl Scouts’ camp.

“Anywhere you have flow constrictions — places where you’re funneling tidal flow through a narrow opening, you’re squeezing the flow — velocities increase, so you get much more kinetic energy,” Haas said. “What we want to do is use tidal turbines that will generate electricity in those hot spots of high velocity concentration.”

Haas’ work has promise far beyond coastal Georgia.

Tidal power could be a gamechanger for remote villages such as those found in Alaska. Many rely on diesel fuel that must be flown in at huge expense.

Small-scale turbines also could help power some of the nation’s Navy or Coast Guard bases, which are working to become self-sustaining.

Haas has assessed the potential for tidal energy across the entire country for the U.S. Department of Energy. He said much of the development so far has focused on commercialscale projects to generate significant power. Yet, much of this untapped resource could offer a supplemental power source to small coastal communities.

“Tidal [energy is] going to be part of the renewable portfolio,” Haas said. “It is definitely not the only answer, [but] it has the potential to help a lot of communities.”

By Joshua Stewart

INNOVATION

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EXPL ATIO

LOR ON

Spring Break among the alpacas

S tudents resear c h

air and Water quality in Bolivia Words by KristEn Bailey

Photos by Lorenzo Tolentino

W

hile many students left campus last March for a welldeserved break from classes, one group boarded a plane for South America, where they spent the week applying their research skills in remote communities in Bolivia.

These students from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering evaluated different methods for testing air and water quality but had to do so outside the comfort of their usual lab and equipment.

“It’s a really powerful and humbling experience to encounter your own limits and the limits of what is possible under certain constraints,” said Joe Brown, the assistant professor who teaches the course, Environmental Technology in the Developing World.

The students spent the spring semester prepping for the trip — determining what kind of equipment to use, how to take samples, where to send them, and how to be as prepared as possible. They spent about six days of the trip gathering data to analyze back in Atlanta, but an equally important goal was for students to learn how the technical side of their work related to cultural, social, and economic aspects of the community where they were working.

The group of 10 undergraduates, two graduate student teaching assistants, and Brown worked with Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz. Brown hopes that built a foundation for other long-term opportunities for research and collaboration with the university. The group also met with U.S. Embassy staff during the trip.

As the class prepared for the trip, they consistently revisited one question: What are we trying to do?

“One of the most valuable things I’ve learned is that we are aren’t going there to provide for people who are lesser than we are,” Yoo said. “These communities are people, with their own values and ways of communicating. We’re there to do research that hopefully will help, but we want to get rid of the doctor/patient relationship idea that we are there to save people. We want to learn about their culture, their perspective, and learn to collaborate with their communities.”

Rebecca Yoo, a third-year civil engineering major pursuing minors in Spanish and Global Engineering Leadership, found the class a perfect fit for her range of interests. In high school, she realized she wanted to pursue development work but wasn’t sure how until she came to Georgia Tech and learned about environmental engineering.

“I was interested in communities that didn’t have the same basic needs met that I had grown up with,” she said.

“I wanted to work with people, so I thought I would end up doing liberal arts, but I decided to try engineering.”

Though she has traveled internationally for mission trips and to study abroad, this was her first trip as an engineer in another country.

“It surprises students to find that they can make a difference with their work,” Brown said. “It can be a life-changing or career-changing experience for them. It changes their perspective on engineering and shows how they can contribute to the world.”

A dozen CEEatGT students spent their Spring Break working in La Paz, Bolivia, and nearby rural communities. Traipsing around with strange apparatuses hanging around their necks or dipping graduated cylinders into lakes and under water spigots. Connecting their years of classroom study to the real world. The goal of the trip, at least from a research perspective? Find low-cost, effective ways to monitor environmental quality — the air and water, in this case.

Turn the page for a look into their journey.

Enrolling in the class is a selective process. Brown looks for students with international interest or experience and dedication to the subject matter. The Joe S. Mundy Global Learning Endowment, designated for international learning experiences for CEEatGT students, provided full funding for the students’ travel.

EXPLORATION

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J ere m y N i c hols f ourth - year c i v il en g ineerin g under g rad, air quality g roup

“The air quality there is fairly terrible.

There are emissions regulations, but they’re not enforced, so you’re spending a lot of your time if you’re in the street or near traffic in a cloud of black and gray and white smoke. Our hypothesis was that the cable car was going to be much better for you than any of those other forms of transportation.”

R ebe c c a Yoo third - year c i v il engineering undergrad water quality g roup

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“From a research point of view, we had two main goals.

The first one was to compare different methods of waterquality testing. Here in the States, we can test water quality in a lab, but in other places, people don’t always have access to that type of technology. So we wanted to see if we could apply a more simple way of water testing and compare the results of the standard method versus a different method. The second goal of our research was to see the difference in the water quality between intermittent and continuous supply. There are places where they only run the pump for a few hours. What can happen when the pump is turned off is that bacteria can enter the system. So we were going to see if that is bad for the community, to have the pump off.”

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“It was also a cultural experience because several of us are interested in developing worlds — how to make developing worlds better and how to help them in the context in which they want help. The whole reason they turn the [water] pump off is because they believe the pump needs to rest. They literally give the pump a Sabbath. So you can’t just waltz in there and be like, [do] it the American way. They’re not going to; it’s not how they function. You have to come in with some cultural knowledge or understanding. You don’t really get that unless you go spend time there. That was cool. That was something I learned a lot.”

Kaitlyn L on g f i f th - year c i v il en g ineerin g under g raduate water quality group

“In general, people don’t really understand the health impacts [of air] as much because you can’t see it. You know, you drink water, you get sick immediately. With air quality, maybe you’re coughing all the time, but you can associate that with all sorts of things.”

Heidi Vreeland, second-year master’s student, air quality group

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“We were trying to make it easier for those who don’t have access to, or don’t know if they have access to clean water, we were going to make it easier to determine that. … Finding a way to easily test your water quality in cost-effective ways and also ways that are easy, ways that wouldn’t need a laboratory or fancy equipment.”

Taryn H eidel third - year en v iron m ental engineering undergrad water quality group

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“It’s definitely one of the more exciting experiences I’ve had in CEE. I really enjoy classes, but there’s only so much you can learn in a classroom, and this one is not just being outside the classroom, it’s being in a whole different country. It’s experiencing what it’s like to be a field worker out in environmental engineering in the developing world. It’s really exciting to have to actually do that tangibly.”

Melissa Meyer f ourth - year en v iron m ental engineering undergrad water quality g roup

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“The reason I enjoy development work and the reason I’ve always focused on this is because I think it’s easy to have an ego — you know, about your education, especially at Georgia Tech where you’re getting a fantastic education — and I think that development work, or just working with people that are not like you exactly, keeps you very humble and reminds you that you don’t know everything.

That’s really important, because I don’t think that we’re ever really excellent at solving problems if we can’t step back and understand really where the person we’re trying to help is coming from or what is it like to be there.”

H eidi Vreeland se c ond - year m aster ’ s student air quality g roup

“This is not an aid project. We’re not going there to do something for anybody. This was very much a partnership that we cooked up that was more or less an equal collaboration between our local counterparts and us. You often think about students going to Bolivia to do something for other people. But this was more structured research.”

J oe B rown assistant pro f essor

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“It’s a different feel now when we see the people we went on the trip with. It’s like we bonded. Because there we were, working on stuff early mornings to late nights. And we had to rely on each other, because not one person knew how to do everything. So coming back, we’re super close. It’s a good feeling.”

Vernon Gentry c i v il en g ineerin g under g rad water quality group

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“Why the trip was so valuable for me is, it gives you so much perspective about engineering and what it can look like literally all around the world, the value of collaborating with people who are learning in a different environment than you are. And it was just a great adventure and a really great way to bond with some students in CEE I probably wouldn’t have gotten to know otherwise.”

B randie B anner f i f th - year c i v il engineering undergrad water quality g roup

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“Student projects, as a general rule, don’t make international or national headlines anywhere. This infrastructure project of the cable-car transit system in Bolivia is the highest profile infrastructure project that Bolivia has ever seen and has received a lot international attention. And there are a lot of very powerful local stakeholders that I think instantly saw the value of this research exercise, because it contributed to these local ideas about sustainable development. So I think it just happened to be the right idea at the right time, and the students did a great job with it. [The air quality group was] able to report results while they were actually in the country, which led to the Bolivian media picking it up.�

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“This is a really powerful experience for a lot of the students for a whole lot of reasons. One of them is just getting your hands dirty. They were totally thrown in the deep end for this exercise, given a real world project, and basically it was up to them to go out and execute it.

They did a fabulous job.�

J oe B rown, A ssistant P ro f essor

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destination

brussels Savannah. San Francisco. Panama. New Orleans. New York.

Washington D.C. Now add Brussels to that list. The CEEatGT alumni trip goes to Europe for the first time in April 2016, with two days of one-of-a-kind experiences.

Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove, B.S. 1977, will lead us on a tour of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe and the Comprehensive Crisis and Operations Management Centre in Mons, Belgium. Then he’s planning a reception for the group at his nearby residence, the Château Gendebien. We’ll also travel to the site of World War II’s famous Battle of the Bulge.

Alumni who join us have the option of continuing their travels along the waterways of Belgium and Holland with a week-long river cruise organized by the Georgia Tech Alumni Association.

For information and registration details, please visit:

ce.gatech.edu/brussels Photo by Zonglin Jack Li

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explorat ion

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Con ver sa tion

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G

laucio Paulino has the heart and soul of an artist, straining against the structured thinking of a sharp and analytical mind.

And it works for him.

The Engineer

as Artist

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Paulino joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in January 2015 as the new Raymond Allen Jones Chair. He specializes in computational mechanics, topology optimization, meta-materials and the emerging field of origami engineering, and he’s a structural engineer bent on pushing the boundaries of his field.

So much of the work Paulino does crosses traditional boundaries between disciplines, bringing together structural engineering and mechanics with architecture, mathematics, industrial engineering, even medicine. And fine art is the next frontier for such collaboration, Paulino said.

CONVERSATION

Glaucio H. Paulino R ay m ond A llen J ones Chair

“See, I am an engineer. I was trained in mathematics, in mechanics. I think very formally all the time,” he said. “Many times, I have too many rules, too many things that I need to follow. But the artist doesn’t care. The artist is disruptive by nature, and he or she wants to be disruptive, wants to break down all the structures and all the preconceived notions.

“If these two can communicate and collaborate synergistically through creative destruction, I think we can have the next breakthrough of the millennium.”

In particular, Paulino sees the possibility of a major advance in origami engineering, a field he has been pioneering in recent years. He and his colleagues are studying the ancient art of paper folding to find new ways to apply it to modern engineering challenges, developing new kinds of structures that are reconfigurable and deployable.

T

hese structures can occupy almost no space when folded up and take up much more volume once they’re deployed. And the applications range from robotics to photovoltaic cells to sustainable buildings.

It’s one of the areas Paulino said he will use the “freedom” of the Jones Chair to explore.

“The possibility to have some funds for you to take risks, intellectual risks, is priceless,” Paulino said, noting that revolutionary advances are possible when scientists can indulge their ideas. “I don’t have that opportunity with any funding agency. No funding agency is going to fund an unproven concept, or an idea that is too risky. But as the Jones Chair, I can do that.”

Paulino also wants to focus his energy on what are known as meta-materials. These are materials with extreme and exotic properties — for example, high energy absorption and fracture resistance — that could have powerful applications.

Consider what happens when you stretch a rubber band. As it gets longer, it also gets thinner.

Imagine a material that does the opposite: as it stretches in one direction, its cross-section actually grows wider. Paulino and his research team are working on conceptual models of these kinds of new substances (what scientists call auxetic materials).

T

he group also works extensively in topology optimization, and this is an area where Paulino, the artist, really emerges. Paulino uses optimization techniques to help design buildings that are one-of-a-kind projects around the world. “Dream buildings,” he called them. The kind of projects you only do once.

Paulino has extended that work into facial reconstruction surgery, working with cancer surgeon Michael Miller at the Ohio State University Medical Center. Their collaboration has the potential one day to change the lives of cancer patients, veterans wounded on the battlefield, and others with severe facial damage or deformities.

“Many times, [the facial reconstruction] doesn’t work very well,” Paulino said. “Restoring normal function and appearance after massive facial injuries with bone loss is an important unsolved problem in surgery.

For example, the doctor may get a bone from other parts of the body, like the fibula, and shape that bone to perform the craniofacial reconstruction. But this region is a very complicated region in the body — while it has a lot of functions, it is also highly susceptible to bacterial infection. It’s a very small area with many basic life functions: breathing, speaking, chewing, and swallowing. A lot of functional requirements need to be maintained when the doctor does that surgery.

CONVERSATION

“The idea here was to use topology optimization — it is the first time this has been done — to offer alternatives to the doctor,” Paulino said.

“The technique is tailored for the specific patient. We use the geometry of the patient, the MRI from the patient, the biology from the patient, the tissue properties … to find what is the best scenario or alternative scenarios that the doctor can use to help the patient when he or she does the craniofacial reconstruction.”

P

aulino came to the School from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, where he was the Donald Biggar Willett professor of engineering for 15 years. He said he was attracted by Tech’s place in a cosmopolitan city with an airport that can link him to almost any destination in the world.

Paulino said he also felt something special when he visited that he couldn’t ignore.

“I felt a lot of energy here in the School, a lot of energy on campus. The challenges and the opportunities here seem to be great. That was very attractive,” he said. “I felt that Georgia Tech is in an ascending slope.”

See how Glaucio Paulino and his colleagues are using topology optimization in facial reconstruction surgery. ce.gatech.edu/annualreport

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D rawin Parallels

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ris Tien joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty last fall after completing her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. She took a few minutes recently to talk about her work and why it’s important to her.

I read you started out in medical research when you were an undergrad studying civil engineering. How did that happen?

I’m not your most traditional civil engineering person. It started from this idea of sensor monitoring, wireless sensor networks, and maybe expanding the definition of health monitoring beyond just structural health monitoring to look at [human] health monitoring.

This opportunity came up to work with the UCSF [University of California, San Francisco] medical school and their Parkinson’s disease research center to use sensors to see if we could diagnose Parkinson’s disease based on how people walked.

That was really interesting to me. I liked working with people, and it seemed a little bit different but potentially fun.

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A ssistant

T ien I ris essor P ro f

And did that plug into your civil engineering experience?

Absolutely. The use of the sensor, developing the system of collecting data, and the dataanalysis part of it is very solidly within engineering and signal processing, pattern recognition, machine learning. That actually informs how I look at data now from structures, doing anomaly detection or classifying data into healthy or unhealthy states.

It’s the same idea, when you put it that way. If somebody’s gait has changed or they have these markers for Parkinson’s, it’s an anomaly. If this road or bridge or piece of civil infrastructure …

If it’s degrading over time, there’s some sort of anomaly that happens.

There’s definitely a parallel.

So you were still thinking you wanted to be an engineer.

I definitely wanted to be an engineer. But even now I think I’m open to revisiting that type of research. Especially here at Georgia Tech with the Emory connection and the CDC [the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], I think there’s

CONVERSATION

a lot of potential opportunities.

The opportunity to work with people and to have that impact on people’s lives is pretty cool.

We talk a lot of about the interdisciplinary research, and the idea that you can take these engineering tools and use them in health probably applies in other areas too.

Absolutely. The two areas that I’ve thought about are health and business. I look at dynamically evolving systems, so you have a human as a dynamically evolving system over time, you have structures that degrade over time, you have humans whose health might degrade over time that you can monitor, and you have businesses that have constantly evolving information.

I like to work at the boundaries between things and cross across disciplines and fields to take ideas or techniques that have been developed in one field and apply and develop them to solve new problems in different fields.

In your research you use Bayesian networks that assess the reliability of infrastructure systems. Tell me about those networks.

You have individual components of a system and each of those components is connected.

A Bayesian network models each of those individual components and the connections between them. What makes them special or powerful is that each of those components are probabilistic: there’s a probability that a component will be in a certain state — to use a simple example, “healthy” or “unhealthy,” or “failed” or “survived.” There’s some likelihood that a component is in one of these states. And then when you’re looking at the connections between the different components, those are also probabilistic.

So if this component is dependent on this other component, that relationship is also modeled in a Bayesian network.

What do these models tell us about the reliability of a system or a structure?

One of things that you can do is identify the critical points of a structure and see the effect of one individual component on the overall system. With Bayesian networks, when you have new information about one part of the network, you can input that one part into the network and then that information propagates throughout the entire network. It will update all of the states of the other components in the system based on what new information you have put in. So when you’re thinking about what does it tell you about a system, you can identify the critical parts of a system, you can say these are the components or the parts that are the greatest vulnerability of

the system. You can also look at the effect of different management or rehabilitation actions on the system. You can say, what if I make this particular part stronger? How would that affect the other components?

How would that affect my overall system performance?

Why do you do this work? Why is it important to you?

Part of what drew me into civil engineering in the beginning was that I like to work with things that you can see around you and that people use every day. These are the systems that people come into contact with every day and that people rely on — when you turn on your faucet, water is going to come out; when you switch on a light, the light is going to turn on; you can get from point A to point B in some sort of reliable manner.

That makes the work important and makes it worthwhile.

You’re trying to improve these systems and improve the reliability and trying to minimize the risk of them failing over time. And on the more theoretical side, it’s kind of like solving a puzzle. How do all these systems fit together and how do you model them? I’ve always really liked solving puzzles.

We’re talking about wear and tear, or the life cycle of infrastructure, but there’s a disaster or unexpectedevent aspect to your work, too.

Exactly. That’s the hazard analysis part of it. With a Bayesian network, you can model a hazard. Say a hurricane blows through. What is the effect on

CONVERSATION

“I’m not your most traditional civil engineering person.” these individual components, and what are the effects of these individual components on the overall system? Those connections are something that I’m working on right now: what’s the best way to model those relationships and have those interdependencies between a hazard and a system and the interdependencies between systems? You can run scenarios as well. If you have this type of earthquake happen, what is the effect if you retrofit this part of the system? And then, if another earthquake happens, what’s the effect? If, after an earthquake, you can bring this part of the system up quicker, how does that affect the overall system?

How does this tool actually get used?

The whole idea is to support decision-making and help decision makers better design, manage, rehabilitate, repair, or even do preventative things to help make these systems more reliable. One of the benefits of a Bayesian network is that it’s a pretty visual thing. You can model out your system and you can look at it. Once the underlying structure is there, it’s almost ready-made to be used by someone who maybe doesn’t have a Ph.D. in engineering but who has a deep understanding of that system and how it works.

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&

Big Ideas

R

am Pendyala joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in fall 2014 as the new Frederick R. Dickerson Chair in Transportation Systems.

Pendyala, a widely recognized expert in next-generation tools for transportation planning, comes east from the Phoenix area, where he was a professor at Arizona State University.

“This was an opportunity for me to join a very reputed and larger transportation group that is home to a couple of university transportation centers, has a long history of undertaking cutting edge research, and has a very close working relationship with Georgia Department of Transportation as well as other agencies,” Pendyala said. “It just seemed like a great opportunity to be able to collaborate with several colleagues working in different domains and see what might be possible.”

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Tiny Data

Big Ideas Pendyala is already at work considering some of the possibilities.

M

aybe the transportation group could start a series of intensive workshops to help transportation planners grapple with cuttingedge issues and technology.

With so many experts on travel behavior in the same building — Patricia Mohktarian, Randall Guensler, Kari Watkins and Laurie Garrow among them — Pendyala thinks it might make sense to form a new center that would make Georgia Tech the go-to place for understanding travel behavior and what it means for infrastructure.

Such a center could even lead to the creation of a new rigorous, peer-reviewed journal, Pendyala said.

CONVERSATION

All are just ideas percolating in his brain so far, but Pendyala sees the platform of the Dickerson chair as an opportunity to launch into large-scale, visibility-enhancing projects. “[The transportation group is] a very high-powered group.

Everybody’s very well known,” Pendyala said. “I think it’s just a matter of coalescing some of our activities and projecting them in a high-impact way.”

Pendyala is just as “highpowered” as his colleagues. He is the new chair of the Planning and Environment Group of the Transportation Research Board’s Technical Activities Division, a position that includes a seat on the council overseeing all of TRB’s technical work. He also just assumed the position of associate editor of the journal Transportation Research Part D.

TINY DATA

P

endyala’s own research focuses on developing and refining new mathematical models that help planners decide what transportation infrastructure their communities need in the years to come.

He’s trying to create models to simulate the activity and travel patterns of an individual or single household.

That kind of high resolution modeling means travel predictions would be more accurate.

It also delivers richer information that allows researchers and policy makers to figure out who benefits (and who doesn’t) from a transportation project or policy. They can isolate a specific segment of the population based on demographics or socioeconomic status, for example, and see how their travel and quality of life is affected or how the project improves or hurts their access to jobs.

These high-definition models can also tell officials what’s happening in any part of the transportation network, down to the detail of a specific intersection at a specific time in the day.

“By going down to that level of detail, you’ll be surprised as to how much performance enhancement you can realize,”

Pendyala said. “Sometimes a network can break down by one intersection becoming a critical bottleneck in the system, or a single link in the network or one particular ramp in the network being sub-optimal.”

Pendyala also works internationally with other researchers looking at improvements to bus rapid transit in India, building smarter infrastructure for growing urban populations, and understanding how people in rapidly developing countries make choices about their travel activities.

With all of that, however, he’s still a teacher at heart.

“At the end of the day it’s all about the students – giving the students the best experience that they can get, exposing them to the different domains of transportation, and providing them opportunities to meet people and present their work at various forums,” Pendyala said. “It really comes down to the student experience, making them have a great time here, learn a lot and be able to carry the Georgia Tech message to wherever they go.

“Their success is really our success.”

CONVERSATION

Ram M. Pendyala Frederick R. Dickerson Chair

“It really comes down to the student experience .... Their success is really our success.”

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Where the

D

Resea

octoral student Janille Smith-Colin spends a lot of time on roads.

Sometimes it’s studying them.

Sometimes it’s running on them.

In the summer of 2014, she and 11 other women ran 196 miles from Madison, Wisconsin, to Chicago in what’s called the Madison to Chicago Ragnar Relay. She typically runs the famed Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta each July 4. And she was back on the road for the Divas Half Marathon in Peachtree City, Georgia, a couple of months later.

Janille Smith-Colin Ph.D. Student

“I always loved transportation.

It gave me this independence that nothing else could.”

A self-proclaimed “slow runner,” Smith-Colin loves it (you can tell when she talks about it). It’s a sport that demands persistence — the same kind of persistence Smith-Colin also has shown in her educational pursuits.

When she decided to work on her Ph.D., she had to exercise a little of that determination to get the professor she wanted to advise her: Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy.

“Over the years, I stalked her,” said Smith-Colin, who’s in her fourth year of Ph.D. work in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “I was pretty persistent, because I wanted to work with her.”

Now she does. And it turns out Georgia Tech ended up being a good place to do that work, she said.

“Part of my struggle had always been, do I want [my Ph.D.] in urban planning or do I want it in civil engineering? Georgia Tech, at least the transportation engineering group, has faculty that provide a good balance between the two disciplines.”

Smith-Colin’s love for transportation planning goes back to her childhood, when she traveled extensively with her family and discovered how mass transit opened cities across the world to her.

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CONVERSATION

arch

meets the

“I always loved transportation,” she said. “It gave me this independence that nothing else could. I thought it was the coolest thing to be someone who studied, developed, planned and implemented transportation.”

That love for transit blossomed into something bigger when Smith-Colin wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on a toll road in Jamaica, her home country. After years of working as an engineer for the Florida Department of Transportation, it unfurled even further. Now Smith-Colin wants to do more public policy planning around transportation and help influence the next generation of women engineers.

“The people who were most influential to me were the people who taught me,” she said. “I believe strongly that as a role model, as an example, you have maybe the largest impact in the classroom, having a young woman see you and believe that that can be her. I think almost at the professional level it’s too late. Because you go through so much in college that people don’t recover from, selfesteem wise, confidence wise.

“Academia is really a setting where a portion of your time can be devoted to truly harvesting the next generation.”

Road Did it work?

Smith-Colin’s research focuses on performance planning — assessing how well new ideas work after transportation planners try them.

“Because of limited funding, there’s a bigger push to understand how a specific intervention impacts transportation and whether the money was wellspent,” she said.

Those interventions could be new technology, policy changes or new initiatives designed to improve how a community gets around. So she’s looking at how to formalize the process of answering a simple question: Did it work? Did that strategy accomplish what we intended?

“In other countries, they’re taking steps to make [that process] more formal, so I proposed we take a look at that,” Smith-Colin said. She pointed to New Zealand, where certain transportation projects go through an official review about a year after they’re completed.

Smith-Colin is getting support for her feedback and assessment research from the U.S. Department of Transportation as an Eisenhower Fellow. It’s just one of a passel of awards she has collected.

CONVERSATION

She was an Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps Fellow in 2014. As part of the program, she spent last summer at Clark Atlanta University helping campus officials develop a Climate Action Plan and find cost savings from energy efficiency.

She has attended the Transportation Research Board conference as an International Road Federation Fellow.

She won the CH2M Hill scholarship from the Women’s Transportation Seminar to support her graduate work in 2014.

And she received that partial Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship from the Federal Highway Administration.

“I’ve always wanted to be an Eisenhower Fellow,” SmithColin says. “[In 2013], I missed the application because a reference didn’t get in, and my heart broke. I was determined this year to get it right. So I’m happy that I got it right.”

Happy—and also determined to win a full fellowship. SmithColin said she started thinking about her next application right after she received news of her partial fellowship.

Yeah, she’s persistent.

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T

he unexpected announcement came in February 2013:

Duke Energy had decided to shutter its Crystal River 3 nuclear reactor in Florida.

At the time, it had been four years since workers discovered cracks in the plant’s concrete containment building. They’d cut through the 42-inch-thick structure to perform what were considered relatively routine upgrades and to replace the reactor’s steam generators. In the process, they identified a cracked a section of the building.

And then, as repairs where nearing completion, they found a similar crack on the other side of the structure. The plant has been shut down ever since.

It’s a situation that ultimately will cost Duke Energy and its Florida customers hundreds of

Photo by Bob Webster.

millions of dollars. The cause of the damage has been attributed to a combination of elements — among them, poor shear capacity of the concrete and the procedure that released the tension on the steel tendons in the structure — but the issue remains poorly understood.

That’s where Bradley Dolphyn comes in.

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering doctoral student is working with professors Lawrence Kahn and Kim Kurtis to figure out just what happened to the massive concrete building. An industry group, the Electric Power Research Institute, is supporting their work.

“This is the first time this [kind of cracking] has been identified anywhere beyond the first few years of a plant’s life — in this case, 30-plus years,” Dolphyn said. “So [we’re] trying to get an understanding of why this plant might be different.”

Dolphyn said there had been no indications of problems with the structure before workers opened it to gain access to the steam generators.

“Before they visually identified [the cracking], there wasn’t any noted indication that anything was wrong,” he said. “That’s one of the aspects we’re trying to look at, understanding how this cracking developed mechanically, the factors structurally or mechanically that would’ve contributed to it, in terms of the concrete, and in general, if this is an isolated scenario or something that might be relevant to other similar structures in the U.S.” Dolphyn said about 30 such buildings exist at the country’s 99 operating nuclear reactors, so that last part is an important question to answer.

To find out, Dolphyn and the team at the School’s Structural Engineering and Materials Laboratory built a full-scale mock-up of the containment building’s wall.

Not the full 200-foot height or the 140-foot outer diameter.

That’s not practical. Instead, they poured two sections 10 feet high, 9 feet long, and 42 inches thick. It’s the same height as each of the concrete pours for the actual building.

Dolphyn also used the same kind of materials to make the concrete and put steel reinforcement in the same places as the original Crystal River 3 containment building. In addition, he made hundreds of cylinders of the same concrete to study how it cures — some at conditions identical to the giant wall and some at a standard 73 degrees Fahrenheit in a fog room.

That’s where his first potentially important discovery has come.

Concrete generates heat as it cures, so the center of massive structures like the containment building’s walls gets really hot as the material hardens.

“In general, standard-cured specimens, [the ones cured] in the fog at 73 degrees, are tested for acceptance of the concrete in the actual structure,” Dolphyn said. “What we found is the concrete that matches the temperature in the wall had notably lower strength than the fog-cured specimens. That suggests that at these later ages, perhaps when they did identify the cracking, the concrete wasn’t as strong as they would have expected.”

Dolphyn said other researchers have documented this temperature influence in concrete. But in the case of the Crystal River 3 building, the primary investigation doesn’t seem to have looked into or accounted for the temperature effect on the laterage strength.

Dolphyn said he’s just getting into his data, but if he finds that the containment building’s problem was the result of the temperature behavior in the concrete, that might be an issue that stretches beyond nuclear power plants to other huge concrete structures.

The Cracks at Crystal

River

Ultimately, Dolphyn said his work will help the nuclear power industry better understand how these massive containment buildings behave over decades. He’ll also be able to suggest design changes to improve their performance or help them make similar steam generator repairs without causing similar damage.

The study also has helped Dolphyn see where his career could go after he finishes his dissertation.

“This research is more of what might be considered a forensic investigation — trying to figure out what happened, what causes this, why was this observed? That was something that I never really thought about in engineering before,” Dolphyn said. “It piqued my interest to see that kind of approach, and in working on this, I can see myself now probably going into that kind of forensic engineering.”

“This research is more of what might be considered a forensic investigation.”

B radley D olphyn P h . D. S tudent

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Keeping

Campus

Clean & Green

I

f first-year Georgia Tech student Grace Brosofsky has her way, all of the landscaping across the Tech campus will be maintained without using any chemical herbicides in the coming years.

And the whole idea grew out of a conflict between her parents over how to best keep their north Georgia lawn weed-free (more on that in a minute).

Brosofsky, an environmental engineering major, has been working on a project for the last few years figuring out the best way to control weeds using natural solutions of vinegar, clove oil and a substance called d-Limonene (that’s the bulk of the oil that’s squeeze out of the skins of citrus fruits when they’re juiced).

Now, with the help of the Georgia Tech chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World, Brosofsky is planning to test her ideas on campus, and she already has initial support from the Institute’s Landscape Services Department.

“Part of what we’re doing right now is an experiment to test different ratios of vinegar and d-Limonene,” Brosofsky said.

“What we’re hoping to do is conduct a small plot study or a field study to experiment with these things and get better results about what combination’s right.

Then we’ll have more confirmed results we can use to implement [a broader plan].”

Brosofsky said her earlier work found that a mixture of concentrated vinegar and d-Limonene did a great job killing weeds after they grew. Now it’s just a question of the best mix, and whether adding something like lemon juice (citric acid) could boost the solution’s weedkilling power.

“A lot of it is changing the mindset that we need to rely on a lot of chemicals to have a lawn that looks decent.”

Grace Brosofsky First-Year Undergraduate

While that part of her work is going on, she’s also going to be looking at what vegetation grows on campus and how other adjustments can be made to the landscaped ecosystems to favor the growth of desirable plants over weeds. She hopes to build off the Institute’s existing sustainable strategies, such as the inclusion of native species. Those plants are more likely to out-compete weeds for space and resources, reducing the amount of herbicide the facilities department would need in the first place.

“A lot of it is optimizing soil for the growth of plants you want, not weeds,” Brosofsky said.

“Combining natural herbicides with an overall sustainable landscape plan can supplant our need for chemical weed control.”

This whole idea for natural weed control grew out of a tugof-war between Brosofsky’s parents about maintaining their north Georgia yard: Mom says “no” to using environmentally harmful chemicals to kill weeds; Dad complains the yard looks terrible if he can’t control them.

When it came time to do a science project for the Google Science Fair, Brosofsky saw a chance to solve the issue — and perhaps have a broader impact.

She set up test plots outside the family’s home and experimented. That’s how she came to her mix of acetic acid (vinegar) and d-Limonene.

Brosofsky’s Engineers for a Sustainable World project team — including Jamie Curtis, Francis Nguyen, Lindsey Tracey and Andrew Vidovich — is getting guidance from a couple of School of Civil and Environmental Engineering professors, Marc Stieglitz and Ching-Hua Huang.

They’re also using the experiences of Northern Arizona University, which stopped using chemical herbicides altogether earlier this year.

Other campuses have made the switch, too, including Florida State University, Harvard University and Seattle University.

“If you look at things other schools have done, [you have to start] with plots that are visible — but of course not exactly in the center of campus — so students can see a sign that says ‘chemical herbicide free,’” Brosofsky said. “Part of making an impact is demonstrating that [the approach] is effective. A lot of it is changing the mindset that we need to rely on a lot of chemicals to have a lawn that looks decent.”

Grace Brosofsky is a “freshman” studying envi-

ronmental engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Freshman” is in those quotation marks because, even though this was her first year on campus, Brosofsky brought enough credits from dual-enrollment courses at the University of North Georgia to be considered a sophomore already.

She won a President’s Scholarship from Tech, which cemented her decision to become a Yellow Jacket instead of going elsewhere.

“I like Georgia Tech’s focus on doing real things, and I felt like it had more of that focus than a lot of other colleges,” Brosofsky said.

“I liked the campus — all the green space. I like the general attitude and all the different opportunities. I feel like there’s always something you can be doing that’s meaningful at Tech,” she said.

“At the same time, they have a lot of nice resources for my major, environmental engineering, and a lot of the professors seem like they’re doing interesting research.”

Brosofsky hopes to use her engineering degree as a stepping stone into law school and a career in environmental law, where she hopes to work on everything from animal rights to deforestation.

“You can apply the environmental engineering knowledge in environmental law because you have to have the approach of looking at whole systems,” she said. “A lot of times, there are unintended consequences to [laws that are passed], so you have to be able to understand everything to see that what [law] you’re passing is really correct.”

Photo by Rob Felt.

Annot

tations

16118

711 under g raduate degrees conferred in the 2014-2015 a c ade m i c year

170

de g ree pro g ra m s

Current National Science Foundation Fellows

graduate students enrolled in the 2014-2015 academic year

411 183

$4

6 14

undergraduate students enrolled in the 2014-2015 academic year

graduate degrees conferred in the 2014-2015 academic year

studentS’ Travel funded by Mundy Global Learning Endowment

$45,840,460 raised from civil and

71

environmental engineering alumni

annotations

Georgia Tech President’s Fellows

for Campaign Georgia Tech

4,000,000

60+ CEE GT

tenure tra c k f a c ulty

57

Mundy Global Learning Endowment countries visited by Mundy scholars

4 BY THE at

NUMBERS Eisenhower Scholars

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STUDENT NEWS

Atiyya Shaw

Sara Shojaee

Brittany Bruder

International Road Federation Fellowship

Buchberg Scholarship Simpson Gumpertz & Heger

Stephanie Amoaning-Yankson

Sebastian Villa

First Place Poster, Technology Solutions, Women in Clean Energy Symposium

American Association of University Women International Fellowship

Thomas Wysockey Civil Engineering Scholarship Deep Foundations Institute

First Place Poster, Policy Solutions Women in Clean Energy Symposium

Alice Grossman

Josephine Bates Elizabeth Nadelman

Kungang Li Peizhe Sun

Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Scholarship

Best Ph.D. Thesis Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Society

Margaret-Avis Akofio-Sowah

David Young

Leadership Legacy Scholarship Women’s Transportation Seminar, Atlanta

Best Master’s Thesis Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Society

Eno Center for Transportation Fellowship Brandie Banner

2015 Engineering Student of the Year, Georgia Society of Professional Engineers Simon Berrebi

Wayne Shackelford Scholarship Intelligent Transportation Society of Georgia Margaret-Avis Akofio-Sowah Jamie Montague Fischer Janille Smith-Colin

2014 Charley V. Wootan Award Transportation Research Board 73

Jose Hernandez

Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher, Georgia Tech Center for Academic Enrichment Ji Yun Lee

First Place Paper, Probabilistic Methods Committee, Engineering Mechanics Institute Conference annotation s

Caroline Golin

Corinna Slater

Joe T. Laboon Award for Co-op Excellence, Georgia Tech Center for Career Discovery and Development Chunhee Cho La Sasha Walker

2014 Asia-Pacific Summer School on Smart Structures

STUDENT NEWS

Georgia Tech’s American Society of Civil Engineers chapter

produced the best-performing bamboo-reinforced concrete beam at this year’s Carolinas Regional Conference in April.

The Tech teams placed second in two other events, the freshmore competition, a scavenger hunt around the Georgia Tech campus that tested first- and second-year students on basic technical skills and civil engineering history; and the hydraulics competition, where students had to calculate and predict scour in a flume.

2015 National Science Foundation Fellowship Atiyya Shaw – for her work

understanding and modeling the visual search patterns of drivers and other users of transportation systems to improve roadway designs and how information is delivered to users.

Brittany Suttner – for her work

developing ways to assess water quality and risk to public health by using the genetic markers of bacteria that usually indicate fecal contamination.

“Our student teams acquitted themselves admirably,” said David Scott, the ASCE chapter’s adviser, noting that much of the group’s preparation time for the competitions was spent organizing the conference itself, which was in Atlanta this year.

That meant arranging for competition venues and hammering out logistics to host 10 schools from throughout the region on campus and around metro Atlanta.

“As the conference drew near, these students put in a lot of hours making sure Georgia Tech was ready when things kicked off,” Scott said. “Despite less-than-hospitable weather on the lake Friday [for the concrete canoe competition] and some unexpected logistical issues Saturday, I am confident in saying that our student chapter represented the School and the Institute as efficient, courteous, and accommodating hosts for the 10 schools that joined us this year.”

Opposite page photos, left to right, top to bottom: Shaw, Amoaning-Yankson, Grossman, Banner, Berrebi, AkofioSowah, Fischer, Smith-Colin, Shojaee, Villa, Bates, Nadelman, Hernandez, Lee, Bruder, Golin, Li, Sun, Young, Slater, Cho, Walker. Above: ASCE’s steel bridge components and concrete canoe. Photo by Trisha Pintavorn.

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Facu lt y N E W S

Awards & H o n o rs David Frost joined the board

of the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering.

Laurie Garrow elected presi-

dent of the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies.

Susan Burns tapped to serve on

Duke Energy’s national coal ash advisory panel.

Reginald DesRoches appointed

to National Research Council’s Board on Army Science and Technology.

Ram Pendyala elected chair of

the Planning and Environment Group of the Transportation Research Board’s Technical Activities Division. Pendyala also became associate editor for the journal Transportation Research Part D.

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Glaucio Paulino elected an American Academy of Mechanics fellow.

Rafael Bras and Barry Goodno

John Crittenden

President’s Distinguished Scientist - Chinese Academy of Sciences John Koon

elevated to American Society of Civil Engineers fellows.

Lifetime Achievement Award – Water Environment Federation

2015 Grand Prize in Research – American Academy of Environmental Engineers & Scientists: Mustafa Aral for his work uncovering contamination at U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp LeJeune.

Laurie Garrow and Kimberly Kurtis Frontiers of Engineering Symposium Invitee – National Academy of Engineering

Research of the Year – Young Professionals in Transportation: Kari WatkiNS for her Cycle Atlanta smartphone app and the related study.

Paul Mayne and Fawad Niazi’s

paper on O-cell loading in axial piles named one of Canadian Geotechnical Journal’s most important of 2014.

annotations

Joe Brown

Arab-American Frontiers of Science, Engineering and Medicine Symposium Invitee – National Academies Rafael Bras

National Hispanic Scientist of the Year – Tampa Museum of Science and Industry Ching-Hua Huang

2014 North American Chemist Award – Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry

Facu lt y N E W S

You can read, watch or listen to the stories featuring our experts at ce.gatech.edu/ annualreport

IN THE HEADLINES Reginald DesRoches

2015 Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award – American Society of Civil Engineers Susan Burns

Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award Lawrence Kahn

Class of 1940 W. Howard Ector Outstanding Teacher Award Armistead Russell

Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award Donald Webster

Class of 1934 Outstanding Innovative Use of Education Technology Award

On wi-fi and commuter trains: Patricia Mokhtarian in Railway Interiors Magazine On the challenges of driverless cars: Michael Hunter in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution On tsunami prediction and recovery: Hermann Fritz on CNN Chile On tidal power from the ocean for Florida: Kevin Haas and Hermann Fritz in the Christian Science Monitor On strengthening buildings in earthquakes: Reginald DesRoches on LiveScience and NSF’s ScienceNation On how well interstate highway ramp meters manage traffic flow: Angshuman Guin on Fox 5 Atlanta

On the bacterial influence on clouds and weather: Kostas Konstantinidis in the New York Times Magazine and on the BBC On the terrible tweets of transit riders: Kari Watkins in The Atlantic’s CityLab On syncing traffic signals to improve traffic: Michael Hunter in Creative Loafing Atlanta On what we’ve learned about earthquake engineering in the last few decades: Reginald DesRoches in BOSS Magazine On the prospects of highspeed rail in Georgia: Kari Watkins on Georgia Public Broadcasting

Photos left to right, top to bottom: Frost, Garrow, Burns, DesRoches, Pendyala, Paulino, Bras, Goodno, Aral, Watkins, Mayne, Niazi, Crittenden, Koon, Kurtis, Brown, Huang, Kahn, Russell, Webster, Mokhtarian, Hunter, Fritz, Haas, Guin, Konstantinidis.

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Our Facu lt y Dr. Adjo A. amekudzi-Kennedy Associate Chair for Global Engineering Leadership and Research Development & Professor PhD, Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Yongsheng Chen Associate Professor PhD, Nankai University

Dr. Mustafa M. Aral Professor PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. John Crittenden Director, Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems; Hightower Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Environmental Technologies & Professor PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Dr. ChloÉ Arson Assistant Professor PhD, École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées Dr. Baabak AsHURI Associate Professor PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology Dr. Nelson C. Baker Dean of Professional Education & Associate Professor PhD, Carnegie Mellon University Dr. Rafael L. Bras Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, K. Harrison Brown Family Chair ScD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Dr. Yong K. Cho Associate Professor PhD, University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Reginald DesRoches Karen and John Huff School Chair & Professor PhD, University of California, Berkeley Dr. Francesco Fedele Associate Professor PhD, University of Vermont Dr. Hermann M. Fritz Associate Professor PhD, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Dr. J. David Frost Professor PhD, Purdue University

Dr. Joe Brown Assistant Professor PhD, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Dr. Laurie A. Garrow Associate Professor PhD, Northwestern University

Dr. Susan E. Burns Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs & Georgia Power Distinguished Professor PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Aris P. Georgakakos Director, Georgia Water Resources Institute & Professor PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Leonid Germanovich Professor PhD, Moscow State Mining University

Dr. John H. Koon Professor of the Practice PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Barry J. Goodno Professor PhD, Stanford University

Dr. Kimberly E. Kurtis College of Engineering Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Scholarship & Professor PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Randall L. Guensler Professor PhD, University of California, Davis Dr. Kevin A. Haas Associate Professor PhD, University of Delaware Dr. Ching-Hua Huang Professor PhD, Johns Hopkins University Dr. Haiying Huang Associate Professor PhD, University of Minnesota Dr. Michael P. Hunter Director, National Center for Transportation Systems Productivity and Management & Associate Professor PhD, University of Texas at Austin Dr. Laurence J. Jacobs College of Engineering Associate Dean for Academic Affairs & Professor PhD, Columbia University Dr. Kostas T. Konstantinidis Carlton S. Wilder Junior Faculty Professorship & Associate Professor; PhD, Michigan State University

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Dr. Jorge A. Laval Associate Professor PhD, University of California, Berkeley Dr. John D. Leonard College of Engineering Associate Dean for Finance and Administration & Associate Professor PhD, University of California, Irvine Dr. Jian Luo Associate Professor PhD, Stanford University Dr. Paul W. Mayne Professor PhD, Cornell University Dr. Patricia L. Mokhtarian Professor PhD, Northwestern University Dr. Rafi L. Muhanna Associate Professor PhD, Higher Institute for Structure and Architecture Sofia, Bulgaria Dr. James A. Mulholland Associate Chair for Graduate Programs & Professor PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Our Facu lt y Dr. Glaucio H. Paulino Raymond Allen Jones Chair & Professor PhD, Cornell University Dr. Spyros G. Pavlostathis Professor PhD, Cornell University Dr. Ram M. Pendyala Frederick R. Dickerson Chair in Transportation Systems & Professor PhD, University of California, Davis Dr. Philip J. Roberts Professor PhD, California Institute of Technology Dr. Lisa G. Rosenstein Senior Academic Professional PhD, Emory University Dr. Armistead G. Russell Howard T. Tellepsen Chair & Regents Professor PhD, California Institute of Technology Dr. J. Carlos Santamarina Professor PhD, Purdue University Dr. David W. Scott Associate Professor PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology Dr. Lauren K. Stewart Assistant Professor PhD, University of California, San Diego Dr. Marc Stieglitz Associate Professor PhD, Columbia University

Dr. Terry W. Sturm Professor PhD, University of Iowa Dr. Phanish Suryanarayana Assistant Professor PhD, California Institute of Technology

Dr. Abdul-Hamid Zureick Professor PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

EMERITUS facu lt y

A djunct Facu lt y

Dr. Iris Tien Assistant Professor PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. G. Wayne Clough President Emeritus PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Yi-Chang James Tsai Professor PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Bruce R. Ellingwood Professor Emeritus PhD, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign

Robert C. Bachus Daniel Castro Maohong Fan T. Russell Gentry John Z. Luh Justin Remais Catherine Ross Costas Tsouris

Dr. Jingfeng Wang Associate Professor ScD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dr. Yang Wang Associate Professor PhD, Stanford University Dr. Kari E. Watkins Assistant Professor PhD, University of Washington

Dr. Lawrence F. Kahn Professor Emeritus PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Dr. James Lai Professor Emeritus PhD, Brown University Dr. F. Michael Saunders Professor Emeritus PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Donald R. Webster Associate Chair & Professor PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Jim C. Spain Professor Emeritus PhD, University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Donald W. White Professor PhD, Cornell University

Dr. Kenneth M. Will Associate Professor Emeritus PhD, University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Arash Yavari Associate Professor PhD, California Institute of Technology

R esearch E n g ineers & S cientists Chengbo Ai Satish Bastola Giovanni Circella Ehsan Goodarzi Angshuman Guin Yongtao Hu Zixuan Hu Jin Yeon Kim Chengwei Luo Mehmet T. Odman Arka Pandit Michael O. Rodgers Frank Southworth Wonho Suh Ann Xu Chuang-Sheng Walter Yang Huaming Yao Guangxuan Zhu

Dr. Sotira Yiacoumi Professor PhD, Syracuse University

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A l umni N E W S

Meg Pirkle, M.S. 1996, named

chief engineer of the Georgia Department of Transportation Tammy Hebeler, M.S. 1999

2014 Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Geotechnical Engineering – Shamsher Prakash Foundation Project Excellence Award – American Society of Civil Engineers Waldemar S. Nelson & Co. (Charles Nelson, B.S. 1970, and Ken Nelson, B.S. 1977) for the Gulf Gateway Terminal in New Orleans

Alumni joined us for a day of golf and wine tasting this spring at the French-inspired Château Élan Resort and Winery outside of Atlanta.

Several of the area’s major construction companies sponsored the tourney and joined us for the day, including the below foursome from JE Dunn Construction Group. They posted the best combined round of the day, a 32-under-par 256 (handicaps included, of course).

Then alumni gathered in the winery’s barrel room to sample wines and hear updates about the School and from Georgia Tech Athletics Director Mike Bobinski.

Christy Jeon, Ph.D. 2007

Top 20 Under 40 – Engineering News Record Southeast Howard Tellepsen Jr.

2015 Dean Griffin Community Service Award – Georgia Tech Alumni Association Robert MacPherson, B.S. 1984

2015 Engineer of the Year – Georgia Society of Professional Engineers Angela Snyder, B.S. 2004

2015 Young Engineer of the Year – Georgia Society of Professional Engineers

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Top photos, left to right: Pirkle, Hebeler, Charles Nelson, Ken Nelson, Jeon, Tellepsen, MacPherson, Snyder. Group photo, left to right: Taylor Bahham, Jennifer Stephens, Iana Steineker, Steven Bowden. Photo by Jess Hunt.

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C E E atG T E x terna l A d v is o r y B o ar D Mr. JosÉ M. Bern B.S. 1995 Vice President, Empresas Bern Gen. Philip Breedlove B.S. 1977 United States Air Force Ms. Jennie Lee Colosi, PE B.S. 1977 President & Treasurer E.T. & L. Corporation Mr. Grosvenor (Rusty) Fish B.S. 1990, M.S. CoM 2000 Vice President of Engineering Operations, Sterling Infosystems Mr. Paul Flower, PE B.S. 1968 President/CEO Woodward Design + Build Mr. Rick L. Garcia B.S. 1973 Retired, Delta Airlines Mr. Ulysses Grady Jr., PE, MCE B.S. 1979, M.S. 1981 Chief Civil Engineer Pentagon 540, LLC

Ms. Sharon Just, PE B.S. 1989 President, Just Engineering & Associates, Inc. Mr. Raymond J. Lawing, PE M.S. 1977 Senior Consultant K.S. Ware and Associates, LLC Mr. Todd I. Long B.S. 1989 Deputy Commissioner Georgia Department of Transportation Mr. Silvio J. Lopez B.S. 1979, M.S. 1981 Senior Vice President Banco Popular Mr. Michael G. Messner B.S. 1976 Partner Seminole Capital Partners Mr. James L. Mitchell B.S. 2005 Business Development Manager, Skanska

Mr. Robert G. Graham B.S. 1976 President, Cone & Graham, Inc.

Mr. Charles W. Nelson, PE B.S. 1970 Chairman, Waldemar S. Nelson and Company, Inc.

Mr. James R. Hamilton, PE B.S. 1977 Senior Associate Kimley-Horn & Associates, Inc.

Mr. Blake V. Peck M.S. 1978 President & COO McDonough Bolyard Peck Inc.

Mr. Bill Higginbotham B.S. 1976 President and CEO ET Environmental Corporation

Mr. Andrew Phelps, PE B.S. 1976 Principal Vice President Bechtel Corporation

Mr. John U. Huffman B.S. 1981 President and CEO Pepco Energy Services

Mr. Wilson L. (Lee) Presley B.S. 1979 Operations Manager Nuclear at CB&I

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CEEatGT External Advisory Board members provide an important outside perspective that is essential to maintaining the relevance of our programs to industry. They play a significant role in vetting programs designed for students, alumni and corporate constituencies to ensure we maintain the highest quality standards in our curriculum, practice and outreach.

Mr. Josh Rowan, PE B.S. 1996 Branch Manager McDonough Bolyard Peck Inc. Mr. S. Paul Shailendra B.S. 2001 President, SG Property Services Ms. Stacie Sire B.S. 1996 Director of Airplane Configuration & Systems Engineering, Boeing Mr. Ronald S. Stuff, ESQ B.S. 1982 Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Sundt Construction Mr. DamiAn K. Taylor B.S. 2001 Vice President, CBRE Capital Advisors Mr. W. Rick Toole, PE B.S. 1979, M.S. 1980 President, W. R. Toole Engineers, Inc. Mr. Michael R. Van Epp B.S. 2003 Senior Vice President Dickinson Financial Corporation Mr. Emilio Venegas B.S. 1977 President, Venegas Construction Corp.

Mr. Richard E. Zalesky B.S. 1978 Advisory Board Chair Retired, Chevron Downstream & Chemicals

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