2019-2020 Annual Report | School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The Georgia Institute of Technology

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

2019-2020 Annual Report

ANNUAL REPORT

JULY 2019 – JUNE 2020 Leadership

Donald R. Webster, Ph.D., P.E. Karen and John Huff School Chair Susan E. Burns, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE Associate Chair for Administration and Finance John E. Taylor, Ph.D. Associate Chair for Graduate Programs and Research Innovation Kevin Haas, Ph.D. Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs Adjo A. Amekudzi-Kennedy, Ph.D., F.ASCE, NAC Associate Chair for Global Engineering Leadership and Entrepreneurship Ashley Coogan Director of Development ashley.coogan@ce.gatech.edu P / 404.385.1604

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech 790 Atlantic Drive N.W. Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0355 communications@ce.gatech.edu P / 404.894.2201 ce.gatech.edu

Words

Melissa Fralick Communications Manager

Photos and design

Amelia Neumeister Communications Officer

What’s Inside 1 Welcome from the Chair 2 By The Numbers 4 School Highlights Stories about students, faculty and alumni 12 Faculty Focus Meet our new and endowed faculty members 15 An Exceptional Year CEE faculty were honored at the highest levels 26 The World is Our Laboratory A glimpse at CEE’s ground-breaking research 34 An Invisible Enemy Researchers respond to the Covid-19 pandemic 40 CEE Abroad 43 Accolades 48 Alumni Leadership Alumni and friends supporting CEE

Resilience.

It’s a concept we talk about a lot here in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, through our pedagogy and our research. How do we as engineers design, build, respond and rise to meet the global grand challenges of the 21st century?

This school year, our students, faculty and staff truly modeled resilience on a personal level while confronting a global pandemic unlike anything experienced in our lifetime.

Halfway through the spring semester, the entire school evacuated campus and moved to a completely remote learning environment within just a week, almost seamlessly.

It’s truly remarkable what we were able to accomplish together with few complaints or technological hiccups.

I am so proud of our students, who rose to the occasion and adapted to this abrupt midsemester shift; the faculty who adjusted their lesson plans to provide continuity through remote classes; and the staff who worked over-time behind the scenes to take care of all the details that made this distance learning mode a reality.

In addition, our faculty seized the opportunity to use their knowledge to help us better understand how this novel coronavirus is shaping our world. Several of our researchers rolled up their sleeves and got to work studying the effects of the pandemic through a civil and environmental engineering lens.

But this academic year wasn’t only defined by crisis. In the following pages, you’ll read about the remarkable achievements of our School’s students, faculty and alumni.

This year, for the first time in our 122-year history, the School’s undergraduate enrollment was 52 percent women. This is an exciting milestone toward gender parity in engineering, and we continue to strive to achieve more diversity and representation in all areas of CEE. Thanks to the generosity of our alumni and supporters, we were able to double the number of endowed faculty positions in our School. This is a huge benefit and gives us a competitive edge to attract and retain top faculty.

This was also a year of great honors. Members of our CEE community were recognized in unprecedented numbers for their achievements by their peers in educational and professional organizations. And, for the 10th year in a row, our civil engineering programs were ranked in the Top 5 by U.S. News and World Report.

We are so proud of the work we’ve done, and we hope you’ll enjoy reading more about what we’ve been up to over the last year.

The only constant in life is change—and if we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that our Civil and Environmental Engineering students are prepared to lead us into the future, whatever challenges it may bring.

Sincerely,

Donald R. Webster, Ph.D., P.E. Karen and John Huff School Chair and Professor 1

CEEatGT

By the Numbers #

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Undergraduate civil engineering

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Undergraduate environmental engineering

1,036 students 20% minority 52% women 35% international

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Graduate civil engineering

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Graduate environmental engineering

1 in10

CEEatGT alumni serve as a company founder, CEO, or president

12,000+ living alumni

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97%

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freshman retention rate across Georgia Tech

student organizations

20 : 1 Students-to-faculty

90%

undergraduate job placement upon graduation

64%

of engineering undergrads study abroad

19 endowed positions

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La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain

THE INTERSECTION OF SKYSCRAPERS AND TREES 18-year-old Ph.D. student Emily Alcazar’s work in structural topology optimization creates buildings that mimic natural beauty Designing a building is a prime application for optimization. Civil engineers and architects must work together in order to balance the engineer’s need for stability and efficiency with an architect’s vision for a beautiful building. But, finding a perfect compromise between form and function can seem impossible.

When done correctly, this delicate balance results in a structure that is not only strong and functional but may be widely appreciated for years to come. Emily Alcazar, an 18-year-old Ph.D. student in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, wants to enable engineers and architects to create such buildings through structural topology optimization.

“You might not think that these projects are that big of a deal, but they impact people’s lives on a daily basis,” said Alcazar. “Streets, parks, community centers, homes. Making these beyond just bare minimum functionality and making them aesthetically pleasing will make everyone’s lives a bit better.”

Alcazar is a recipient of the prestigious National 4

“You might not think that these projects are that big of a deal, but they impact people’s lives on a daily basis. Streets, parks, community centers, homes. Making these beyond just bare minimum functionality and making them aesthetically pleasing will make everyone’s lives a bit better.” ­—Emily Alcazar

Photo Courtesy of Emily Alcazar. Design by Sarah Collins

Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which will provide her with professional development resources and opportunities to collaborate with researchers internationally. At 18, Alcazar doesn’t think her age impacts her studies much at all— she’s simply happy to focus on research she truly loves.

She and her fellow researchers in structural topology optimization use algorithms to determine the ideal layout of a structure – one that uses minimal materials, can withstand environmental factors, is structurally sound and strong and complies with safety guidelines.

Incredibly, the outputs of these algorithms are often beautiful and reminiscent of natural structures, like trees or spider webs.

“What we’re doing is we’re using complex algorithms to solve for complicated and realistic structural design problems and consequently we end up getting architecturally aesthetic, biomimetic building designs,” said Alcazar.

Structural design that takes inspiration from nature isn’t anything new. One of Alcazar’s favorite examples is the architect Antoni Gaudi, who was influenced by the movement of water and the shapes of trees, seen heavily in his design of Sagrada Familia.

“Now, people from all over the world go to see his work, said Alcazar. “It’s a great example of making

something more than functional, making it beautiful.”

Smaller-scale structures such as car parts and even airplane wings have already been designed via structural topology optimization and manufactured through additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. During her first year of her Ph.D. program, Alcazar has focused on developing a better 3D printer, called a grayscale Digital Light Processing (g-DLP) 3D printer. The g-DLP printer uses ultraviolet light to solidify resin and form smooth transitions between different materials.

According to Alcazar, perfecting this technique would be a big step towards making structural topology optimization feasible in the construction industry. She also hopes to advance the algorithms used in her field so that design firms and engineers all over the world can begin to make beautiful and efficient buildings.

Alcazar was drawn to Georgia Tech because of her admiration for the structural topology work of Glaucio Paulino, Raymond Allen Jones chair and professor of civil engineering. Someday, she too hopes to work in academia and teach students to think more creatively.

Alcazar thinks that art and engineering are still a bit too far apart. Through structural topology optimization, which merges the two worlds, she hopes to eventually see a world where the details of the buildings she looks at resemble trees reaching high or the waves of the sea.

—Polly Ouellette

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A DIFFERENT KIND OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION Lisa Rosenstein’s Engineering Communications Program Gives CEE Students a Leg Up

With her Ph.D. in english literature, Lisa Rosenstein is a bit of an anomaly among her colleagues in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

While she doesn’t teach fluid mechanics or structures, her instruction is no less foundational for her students to succeed at Tech and in the professional world.

In 1998, Rosenstein joined the School to develop the Engineering Communications Program, which integrates written, oral and visual communication skills into the engineering curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

In May 2020, she was promoted to Principal Academic Professional in recognition of her contributions to the School over more than 20 years.

Karen and John Huff School Chair Don Webster says that the communications program is a major benefit for the School that sets a Georgia Tech education apart from other leading civil and environmental engineering programs around the nation.

“Dr. Rosenstein’s pioneering engineering communications programs have become enduring legacies and generate envy among many peer institutions. We are very fortunate to have her as a member of our academic team,” Webster said.

Engineering schools across the country—including Georgia Tech—often required students to take courses in technical writing in english departments, but Georgia Tech was the one of the first to embed this instruction within the individual engineering programs themselves.

The shift allows a wide range of communications skills like report writing, data display, and explaining research to nontechnical audiences to be taught within the context of the discipline.

This forward-thinking program was made possible 6

Lisa Rosenstein teaches students a range of communication skills within the context of the engineering discipline.

by the Mundy family, which gave the School a generous gift to create a new model of engineering education.

“These programs have grown across the country,” Rosenstein said. “We’re not the only ones who have them any more, but we were very much at the vanguard.”

Rosenstein’s tenure at Georgia Tech goes back to the late 1980s, when she began teaching technical writing for the English Department while finishing her Ph.D. at nearby Emory University.

When Georgia Tech restructured its units several years later, these courses offered in support of the engineering curriculum were moved into the College of Engineering.

Rosenstein was hired to develop communications programs for both the Schools of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Materials Science Engineering, where she remained a joint appointment until 2015.

Rosenstein was given a blank slate: no one at the time knew what this type of program should look like simply because it didn’t exist before. “I had taught at Tech, knew the students, knew what they needed to know and, crucially, knew the most effective way to teach them, so I was the obvious choice to envision and create this program from the ground up,” Rosenstein said.

In fact, Rosenstein’s role was so unusual that the Institute didn’t really know what to do with her initially. She was hired as a staff member, though she functioned as faculty. She later became part of a new classification known as Academic Professionals.

“It’s a cohort of academics who contribute to the educational mission of the Institute but are not on a traditional tenure track,” Rosenstein said. “You are an academic, typically have a Ph.D., but don’t do the typical work of academics. I have a Ph.D. in English, so I couldn’t possibly be an engineering professor.

But I work for an engineering school.”

CEE’s Engineering Communications Program is an in-house model, meaning that communications material is incorporated into the curricula of engineering courses, rather than being offered as stand-alone classes. Rosenstein serves as a coinstructor or guest lecturer in several courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

For example, she’s a co-instructor in Engineering Systems, a core course in which she introduces

The CEE London study abroad group rides on the London Eye after studying the axial forces in the cables and supports.

“Once [students] get into the work place, they often see that what they’ve learned is so much beyond what any of the other new hires have learned.”

–Lisa Rosenstein students to the three modes of engineering communication: written, visual, and oral.

She is also a co-instructor for senior design courses, in which she teaches students how to write design reports and deliver oral presenations to engineering firms, businesses or government agencies. By teaching in a variety of course levels, Rosenstein has the benefit of teaching the same students over the years as they matriculate through their degree programs.

“One of the great benefits of having an in-house person is the consistency. I know what they know because I’ve taught them,” Rosenstein said.

Rosenstein has also helped the School expand its international offerings. She helped create the Global Engineering Leadership Minor and she coleads CEE’s study abroad program in London with Associate Professor Lauren Stewart.

“We are the first program to take integrated communications instruction into a study abroad program,” Rosenstein says.

While it hasn’t always been easy to get engineering students excited about communications, Rosenstein takes pride in knowing that she is equipping them with skills to explain complex, technical material clearly and concisely.

“I get so many emails from former students,” Rosenstein says. “Once they get into the work place, they often see that what they’ve learned is so much beyond what any of the other new hires have learned.

The students themselves report their lived experience of what’s valued in the work place.”

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NEW COURSES

EXPLORING CEE

New course for freshmen increases understanding, engagement The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering debuted a new course in Fall 2019 with a focus on freshmen.

Called “Exploring CEE,” this three-credit course introduces first-year students to a broad range of civil and environmental engineering topics through interdisciplinary research areas, guest lecturers and team problem-solving exercises.

Developed and co-taught by Assistant Professor Emily Grubert and Associate Professor Kevin Haas, the course aims to provide students with a greater sense of understanding and belonging to the civil and environmental engineering fields early in their academic journey.

CEE programs across the country struggle with retention. A main culprit is that students often aren’t significantly engaged with civil and environmental engineering material until after they’ve completed their core courses halfway through their college experience.

Haas, who serves as the School’s associate chair of undergraduate programs, conducted an analysis of CEE students at Georgia Tech to determine when they enter and exit the program.

What he found was a net zero loss: While around 50 percent of students transfer into the School, about half of students who initially declare civil engineering or environmental engineering as their major do not stay in these programs.

School leadership determined that early and continuing engagement in the discipline would help keep more students in the program. As a result, “Exploring CEE” was developed as a way to introduce first-year students to all that the civil and environmental engineering majors and professions have to offer.

The pilot course was structured into a series of four three-week modules. Each module focused

“Exploring CEE” was developed as a way to introduce first-year students to all that the civil and environmental engineering majors and professions have to offer.

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on one of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s cross-cutting research areas: Smart Cities, Sustainable Systems, Resilient Infrastructure and Healthy Communities.

For each module, students engaged in a repeating pattern of activities designed for them to “learn, do and reflect.”

The students learned background information and context about a topic, implemented their new knowledge in a group setting, and finally reflected on their own experiences and the role of the topic within the broader civil and environmental engineering field.

The course also featured alumni and faculty guest lecturers who spoke about a variety of topics including: sustainable structures, coastal hazards, bio-inspired engineering, and engineering responses to climate change.

“The course is helping students understand that ‘civil and environmental engineers can do that,’ across a variety of really exciting topics that we address as a profession,” Grubert said. “It's been a real pleasure to watch students realize the scope of what we do as a School, while simultaneously realizing that we're a supportive community with a ton of interests.”

Students from the "Exploring CEE" class touring the new Kendeda Building for Innovative and Sustainable Design

NEW COURSES

INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Elective introduces CEE students to the business side of engineering

For the first time in Spring 2020, students had the opportunity to take a course uniquely focused on entrepreneurship within the context of civil and environmental engineering.

The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Course is part of a sustained effort in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering to offer more resources for students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and performance skills to complement their technical education.

The course was co-taught by three instructors, each bringing a different perspective and area of expertise.

Bill Higginbotham, CE 76, is president and CEO of ET Environmental Corporation and a lifelong entrepreneur.

He led the class with Academic Professional Robert Simon, a leadership scholar, and Professor John E. Taylor, the School’s associate chair of graduate programs and research innovation.

The course was organized around lectures, guest speakers, and a team project that put the material students learned into action. The instructors covered a range of topics about creating and sustaining a business, including business formation and modeling,

Bill Higginbotham leading the discussion on entrepreneurship in the new "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" course

The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Course is part of a sustained effort in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering to offer more resources for students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and performance skills to complement their technical education. marketing, financing, risk mitigation, and more.

In addition to business topics, the students also learned the kind of skills that will help them succeed in the professional world such as idea generation, teamwork and leadership.

The inaugural class of 25 students was divided into six teams, with each responsible for creating an idea to form a new company.

“It was a very interactive class,” Higginbotham said.

“We would spend some of every class period working directly with the teams, mentoring them and shaping their ideas.”

The teams formed businesses relating to software, concrete, construction management, and more, reflecting the variety of opportunities available to civil and environmental engineering graduates.

After the teams developed a business plan, they were presented with a new challenge: real-world risk management scenarios tailored to each team’s mission.

From the midterm on, students focused on how to respond to these challenges, which included hacking, litigation, and product failure.

Midway through the Spring 2020 semester, the class experienced an unexpected risk scenario first-hand.

The emerging Covid-19 pandemic forced the class to meet remotely for the remainder of the semester after campus shut down in March.

“All of us pointed to Covid-19 and said, ‘you never know what’s going to happen,’” Simon said. “It was a very real-life parallel to what we were talking about. You have to be prepared to adjust.”

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Living and Learning Georgia Tech’s Kendeda Building pushes the boundaries of green building Over the last academic year, a building unlike any other opened its doors at Georgia Tech.

The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, dedicated on Oct. 24, 2019, is more than sustainable — it’s regenerative. It diverted more waste from landfills than it sent to them during construction and is projected to generate more on-site electricity and collect more water than it consumes over the course of a year.

In a nutshell, the building actually creates more energy than it uses and has already become a model for green building.

“The Kendeda Building is an incredible and beautiful example of sustainable design, integration with nature, human inclusion and well-being. It is the most sustainable building of its kind in the Southeast,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera at the building’s dedication. “Thanks to our partnership with The Kendeda Fund, it will inspire architects, civil engineers, business and policy leaders for generations to come.”

The Kendeda Building is the first academic and research building in the Southeast designed to be 10

certified as a living building by the International Living Future Initiative.

One of the key members of the construction team was civil engineering alumnus Jimmy Mitchell, CE 05. Mitchell is a sustainability engineer with Skanska USA and a cofounder of the Lifecycle Building Center, an Atlanta nonprofit that is dedicated to salvaging items from renovation and demolition sites and making them available for reuse.

“Reusing materials in both new construction and renovation has been a passion of mine for more than a decade. I believe it’s an important element for any truly green project,” Mitchell said. “I’m proud that we managed to incorporate unique materials into the building’s design, support the neighboring community and divert tons of “waste” from landfills — all at the same time.”

Mitchell’s influence can be seen throughout the building’s innovative use of salvaged materials.

The Kendeda Building’s central staircase features stair treads that were built using heart-of-pine joists that were recovered during a recent renovation of Tech Tower. These original joists from the 1880s give The Kendeda Building a special connection to Georgia Tech history. Another

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1 (1) A view from The Kendeda Building's atrium. (2) Jimmy Mitchell, CE 05, leads members of the CEE Executive Advisory Board on a tour of The Kendeda Building in Oct. 2019. (3) The natural grain of wood provides a beautiful visual element. (4) Mitchell explains the building's unique systems. (5) The Kendeda Building's exterior

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prominent example is in the second story floor boards, which were created by alternating two-bysix and two-by-four boards to form a unique visual pattern on the ceiling below.

The team utilized thousands of two-by-fours from movie sets left behind by production companies in Georgia. Skanska partnered with the nonprofit GeorgiaWorks!, which provides job training to help end the cycle of homelessness. The GeorgiaWorks! clients were hired to nail the thousands of boards together to fabricate the panels for the flooring.

This one aspect of construction had several benefits: The men from GeorgiaWorks! got experience to start careers in the construction industry, and around 25,000-linear-feet of two-byfours were diverted from the landfill.

More about The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design: In 2015, The Kendeda Fund committed $25 million for a living building on campus in an effort to prove a regenerative building was practical even in the Southeast’s heat and humidity. An additional $5 million will support programming activities once the building is certified.

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New Faces

M E E T O U R N E W E S T FA C U LT Y

Chris Lai

Assistant Professor Lai’s work on turbulence has impact across disciplines, including for mechanical and aerospace engineering. He’s planning a new kind of experimental facility at Georgia Tech that will allow him to observe and document flow around objects in all three dimensions. Lai comes to Georgia Tech from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was a postdoctoral researcher on the extreme fluids team. He earned his Ph.D. at Texas A&M University.

Ryan Sherman

Assistant Professor

Sherman’s research focuses on addressing aging infrastructure, particularly steel infrastructure. His expertise is in large-scale structural experimentation, structural health monitoring, sensor development, material characterization, fatigue and fracture, and analytical simulations.

Sherman comes to Georgia Tech from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He earned his Ph.D. at Purdue University and is a licensed professional engineer in Nevada.

Robert Simon

Academic Professional Simon will bolster the school’s Global Engineering Leadership Minor and work with faculty to develop course modules on change management, innovation, organizational behavior, leadership and other topics. Simon earned a Ph.D. in educational leadership from Clemson University and has been with the school since 2012 as the graduate programs manager.

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Faculty Endowments LEARN ABOUT OUR NEW POSITIONS

Kostas Konstantinidis

Richard C. Tucker Professor

Konstantinidis joined the faculty in 2007, and previously held the Carlton S. Wilder Junior Professorship and the Maulding Faculty Fellowship. His research focuses on the genetic and metabolic diversity of bacteria and archaea, and the role this diversity plays in the environment. Konstantinidis also holds courtesy appointments in Georgia Tech’s schools of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. from Michigan State University.

Lauren Stewart

Williams Family Early-Career Professor Stewart came to the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2013 and was promoted to associate professor and granted tenure in 2019. Her research focuses on the extreme loading of structures extending to blast, shock, seismic and other hazard applications. She is known for her innovative experimental techniques and for developing unique experimental facilities. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, San Diego.

Iris Tien

Williams Family Early-Career Professor Tien came to Tech in 2014 after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She was recently promoted to associate professor and granted tenure. Tien’s research expertise is in risk and reliability of civil infrastructure systems. Her major contributions are in the areas of complex systems modeling of critical infrastructure, structural risk and reliability, and big data analytics for real-time system assessment.

Ching-Hua Huang Turnipseed Family Chair

Huang joined the CEE faculty in 2000, and was promoted to professor in 2014. Her expertise is in the area of environmental chemistry and engineering, with emphasis on water quality and sustainability, environmental fate of emerging contaminants, innovative drinking water and wastewater treatment technologies, and waste remediation and resource recovery. Huang has published extensively in these areas, and her research has been sponsored by industry and government agencies.

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Messner Challenge Complete

3 faculty members named to new endowed professorships and chairs this year The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering ended the 2019-2020 school year on a high note by appointing three faculty members to newly endowed positions.

The endowed chairs and professorships were created as part of the Messner Faculty Challenge.

Through their family foundation, Jenny K. and Michael G. Messner, CE 76, established the challenge within the Georgia Tech Foundation. The challenge, which started Oct. 10, 2018, and ended June 30, 2019, provided dollar-for-dollar matching gifts up to $5 million for endowed professorships and faculty chairs.

“The overarching goal was to provide up to $10 million in additional permanent endowment for support of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering,” Michael Messner said.

Prior to the challenge, there were six endowed faculty chairs and professorships available to the School’s 48 tenured and tenure-track faculty — which meant that only 12.5 percent of the faculty had access to the career-building and program-enhancing benefits that these endowed positions offer.

Thanks to the generosity of the Messners and two

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“The overarching goal was to provide up to $10 million in additional permanent endowment for support of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.”

—Michael Messner

dozen other donors, the Messner Challenge has created four new endowed professorships and three new faculty chairs. In addition to other recent gifts, this brings the total number of endowed faculty positions up to 19. These additions “will enable the School to be even more successful in retaining and recruiting exceptional faculty at mid- and senior-career levels,” Messner said.

Endowed faculty chairs and professorships will now be available to a greater portion of the faculty, making Georgia Tech more competitive by bringing the number the endowed positions available in line with peer institutions.

An appointment to a faculty chair is among the highest forms of recognition a faculty member can achieve. Chair holders are considered preeminent teachers and scholars in their fields with the ability to attract top students and talented faculty, conduct innovative research and draw external funding.

Endowed professorships recognize mid-career faculty and attract scholars who stretch the boundaries of their disciplines and prepare them to take their place among future faculty leaders.

In addition to prestige, chairs and professorships provide faculty members with discretionary funding for research, equipment, travel and other professional development to advance their work.

The following endowed professorships and faculty chairs resulted from the Messner Faculty Challenge: The G. Wayne Clough Chair The Dwight H. Evans Professorship The Higginbotham Family Professorship The Bonnie W. and Charles W. Moorman IV Professorship The José D. Pérez Chair The Turnipseed Family Chair The Williams Family Professorship

AN

EXCEPTIONAL YEAR

It was a banner year for the faculty of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with several professors earning career-defining awards from top educational and professional organizations. In the following pages, read more about CEE faculty who have been recognized for their accomplishments in research, teaching and leadership.

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TEACHING EXCELLENCE School Chair Don Webster was honored with a statewide award for his innovative instruction Professor Donald Webster, the Karen and John Huff Chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was selected as the recipient of the 2020 Felton Jenkins, Jr. Hall of Fame Faculty Award for the University System of Georgia.

This prestigious teaching award recognizes faculty for their strong commitment to teaching and student success.

Webster is the only faculty member from a Georgia research university to receive this systemwide award.

“Being selected among the many, many outstanding faculty instructors in the University System who are dedicated to teaching and student success is an exhilarating honor,” Webster said. “I am passionate about student-centric instruction and creating pathways for success in challenging engineering courses, so it’s thrilling to be recognized for innovative teaching approaches that improve student achievement.”

In more than 20 years at the Institute, Webster has been widely recognized for his success as a teacher, researcher and administrator.

In particular, Webster has received many accolades for his teaching excellence and use of the “flipped classroom.” In this teaching model, students watch a recorded lecture before class, and use classroom time for more engaging handson learning and interaction with their instructor.

“Dr. Webster has shown that student achievement, engagement, and perceptions in the blended classroom are significantly improved,” said Steven McLaughlin, the dean and Southern Company Chair of the Georgia Tech College of Engineering. “Remarkably, the percentage of students withdrawing or receiving an F or D grade is reduced by half compared to traditional lecture courses. This indicates that the blended classroom format provides effective support for students

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who otherwise might struggle in these demanding engineering mechanics courses.”

Webster first implemented the flipped classroom model in his undergraduate fluid mechanics course in 2013. In the years since, he has expanded the concept to other courses and shared his findings with fellow faculty at Georgia Tech as well as the larger engineering education community at conferences and published articles in peer-reviewed journals.

“As noteworthy as his teaching innovations is the fact that Dr. Webster assesses his efforts—and then disseminates his findings so that other educators can benefit from what he has learned,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Georgia Tech. “His colleagues have taken notice of his success, and as a result, he is a mentor who has inspired and supported many in their approach to teaching.”

A member of the Georgia Tech faculty since 1997, Webster is recognized as an expert in environmental fluid mechanics. His recent research on sea butterflies has led to a greater understanding of how human activities are changing natural systems.

Webster was named chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2018. In his current and previous roles, he has worked with faculty to bring innovative curriculum advances, create undergraduate research opportunities and study abroad experiences, and diversify the student body.

Despite the administrative responsibilities he’s taken on as school chair, Webster continues to teach a large undergraduate engineering mechanics course.

“I believe it is critically important that, while in an administrative role, I stay connected to our current students. It benefits me to know what they are thinking, especially in a technical instructional context, and I think they benefit by having direct access to the school chair.”

“I am passionate about student-centric instruction and creating pathways for success in challenging engineering courses, so it’s thrilling to be recognized for innovative teaching approaches that improve student achievement.” ­­—Donald Webster

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Professor Susan Burns was selected as the state’s top engineer for her contributions to teaching, research and the engineering profession Professor Susan Burns, associate chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech, has been selected as the 2020 Engineer of the Year by the Georgia Society of Professional Engineers.

The society’s annual awards honor licensed engineers who have made outstanding contributions to the engineering profession, the public welfare and humankind. The awards are judged by the Engineering Council of Birmingham, and winners are selected from five categories: 18

Engineer of the Year in construction, education, government, industry and private practice.

The judging committee also designates an overall Engineer of the Year by selecting the highest scoring winner from all of the nominated categories. Burns was named the 2020 Engineer of the Year for her tremendous impact on the engineering profession through her research, teaching and professional service.

“I am so grateful to have been selected for this remarkable honor. I am inspired every day

“Susan is one of those faculty you would like to clone. She does it all, and does it well. She brings talent, creativity, and passion to her teaching, research, and professional service.”

—G. Wayne Clough

by the amazing work of my colleagues and students, and I am thankful to work in a profession that is focused on improving the human condition,” Burns said.

A lifelong Yellow Jacket, Burns earned four degrees in civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech, culminating with her Ph.D. in 1997.

She served as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia from 1997-2003 before returning to the Institute to join the faculty of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2004.

As a professor, she has been recognized as one of the top teachers at Georgia Tech with many teaching awards over the years and earned the respect of her colleagues for her contributions to the field.

Burns is also dedicated to improving diversity and inclusion within the field of engineering. Roughly half of the masters and Ph.D. students she has advised are from underrepresented groups in engineering. She is also active in outreach at the undergraduate and high school levels.

“Susan is one of those faculty you would like to clone.

She does it all, and does it well. She brings talent, creativity, and passion to her teaching, research, and professional service,” said G. Wayne Clough, president emeritus of Georgia Tech.

Burns’ geoenvironmental research focuses on the beneficial use of waste materials including dredged sediments, fly ash and ponded fly ash; interfacial behavior of organic- and inorganic-coated soils; the transport and behavior of microbubbles in saturated porous media; and hydraulic conductivity and consolidation properties of finegrained soils.

Among her many professional recognitions, Burns was elected as a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, served as president of the US Universities Council on Geotechnical Education and Research, and earned a CAREER Development Award from the National Science Foundation.

“Dr. Burns is a highly respected professor of geotechnical engineering, who has distinguished herself in geoenvironmental engineering research and the advancement of the practice. She is an award-winning, gifted teacher and scholar who serves as a positive role model for all young academics and the students she inspires,” said Jean-Louis Briaud, a professor at Texas A&M University and president-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

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NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy named one of the newest members of the National Academy of Construction

Professor Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy was inducted into the National Academy of Construction, joining the ranks of the nation’s most distinguished engineering and construction professionals.

Election to the academy is reserved for exceptional leaders who represent all sectors of the built environment and whose careers have made a significant impact on the construction industry. The 2019 class includes 39 new members considered from more than 300 industry leaders.

“I am excited and honored to have been elected to the academy,” AmekudziKennedy said. “This is a distinguished group of leaders who have made, and continue to make, extraordinary contributions to the engineering and construction industry. I am especially pleased to join the academy and continue to work with others on infrastructure issues that improve the quality of life of communities, advance the nation’s economy, and protect the natural environment.”

Amekudzi-Kennedy is a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School’s associate chair for global engineering leadership and entrepreneurship. She is an internationally recognized authority on infrastructure and sustainable development. The academy recognized her leadership in complex Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy (center) with NAC President Tom Sorley (left) and NAC Vice President Maggi Walker (right) at the 2019 National Academy of Construction induction ceremony.

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Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy (top row, sixth from left) with the 2019 class of the National Academy of Construction

infrastructure systems engineering, focused on the integrated built, natural, and social environment, to improve decision making for sustainable development.

Her research has found and continues to find applications in infrastructure planning, evaluation, renewal and reporting, and in undergraduate and graduate education.

Amekudzi-Kennedy also was elected a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2018 and is co-founder of Georgia Tech’s Global Engineering Leadership Minor.

She was officially inducted into the National Academy of Construction during a ceremony on Oct. 24, 2019, in Nashville, Tenn. As a member of the academy, Amekudzi-Kennedy joins civil engineering alumni William Calhoun and Leo Vecellio as well as alumnus and Georgia Tech President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough.

“I am grateful for several mentors, colleagues and students over the years who have been invaluable in my development as a scholar, educator and professional,” she said.

“I am especially pleased to join the academy and continue to work with others on infrastructure issues that improve the quality of life of communities, advance the nation’s economy, and protect the natural environment.”

—Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy 21

A PROMISING

CAREER

Sheng Dai won the NSF’s most prestigious award for early career faculty

Assistant Professor Sheng Dai has won a 2020 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation.

The CAREER Award is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for early-career faculty, recognizing those who have the potential to serve as role models in research and education and to lead advances in their fields.

Dai will receive $540,362 over five years for his proposal, “Transforming Multiphase Flow in Porous Media from Passive Pore Fluids to Active Suspensions of Motile Bacteria.”

“It’s an honor and a recognition of the potential of this idea to transform the way we think about flow in porous materials,” Dai said. “It gives us tremendous flexibility and resources to explore this topic with lots of potential applications relevant to energy and environmental issues.”

To put it simply, Dai’s research will focus on the use of active particles, like motile bacteria, to alter the flow of fluids through porous media, like soils and rocks.

The active particles Dai will be using in the lab are benign strains of E.coli bacteria. Dai says that altering the motility of the bacteria in water has the potential to change its natural flow patterns.

The active particles can also be used to achieve what’s known as stable displacement. Take for example oil that is lodged underground. Because it is heavy and viscous, the oil industry often injects a large amount of water into the ground to force the oil out. However, this process has low efficiency and also creates polluted water.

By using active particles, Dai says a process known as stable displacement could be achieved. This would require less water to force the oil out at an even rate, despite water being much lighter than oil.

While Dai’s research will focus on the fundamental

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“It gives us tremendous flexibility and resources to explore this topic with lots of potential applications relevant to energy and environmental issues.”

—Sheng Dai

Photo by Jess Hunt-Ralston

fluid mechanics of these processes, other potential applications include energy and resource recovery, contaminant treatment and medical science.

As part of the NSF CAREER Award, Dai is also developing an educational component related to his research. He will create teaching materials for high school students and teachers to learn about flow processes, porous media, subsurface energy and minerals. He will also create an app to allow users to visualize and contrast flow of various fluids in different porous materials.

Dai has been an assistant professor in geosystems engineering at Georgia Tech since 2015. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering at Tongji University in China, as well as a master’s degree and Ph.D. in civil engineering at Georgia Tech. After graduation, he worked in the Predictive Geosciences Division at the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy before returning to Georgia Tech to join the faculty.

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A LIFETIME

OF ACHIEVEMENT President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough selected for two lifetime achievement awards President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough received two prestigious awards in recognition of his lifetime of achievements.

Clough, CE 64, MS CE 65, was honored with the University System of Georgia’s Elridge McMillan Lifetime Achievement Award for his leadership and service to public higher education.

The Elridge McMillian Lifetime Achievement Award is the highest honor the USG bestows.

The award is given in recognition of extraordinary service to higher education in Georgia.

He was also named the recipient of the 2020 Lifetime Achievement in Engineering Award by the Georgia Society of Professional Engineers.

The award recognizes those who have made significant contributions throughout their careers to the engineering profession, the public welfare and humankind.

His myriad achievements in the field of engineering are unique. He has been not only a leading civil engineer, but a visionary educator, institutional leader and author.

Clough served as the 10th president of Georgia Tech and as the 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Clough is regarded as one of the leading geotechnical and earthquake engineering academicians and practitioners in the U.S. He has served as an expert consultant on many high-profile projects, including a seismic retrofit of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco. He has also authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed technical papers related to his areas of expertise.

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President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough (center) with members of the USG Board of Regents and Gov. Brian Kemp (right).

He has been not only a leading civil engineer, but a visionary educator, institutional leader and author.

He served on the geotechnical engineering faculty at Virginia Tech, Stanford and Duke before returning to Georgia Tech, his alma mater, to serve as president of the Institute from 1994 to 2008.

During his tenure, the Institute’s national rankings rose into the top 10 among public universities. The student population increased by 38 percent, funding for external research more than doubled, and Georgia Tech served as the Olympic Village for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. Two successful national fundraising campaigns resulted in increases in endowed faculty positions, support for student leadership programs, and new crossdisciplinary research initiatives.

The G. Wayne Clough Georgia Tech Promise Scholarship was created, allowing financially disadvantaged students to graduate without accruing debt. The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University was created. More than $1 billion was invested in campus improvements, including the Biotechnology Complex, Technology Square, the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, the Campus Recreation Center, and the Undergraduate Learning Commons, which was subsequently named in honor of Clough.

As Secretary of the Smithsonian, Clough brought focus to the diverse activities of the world’s largest research and museum complex. His tenure brought an institution-wide commitment to sustainability, formation of an Office of Smithsonian Education, creation of an office for crossdisciplinary research, and more.

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THE

WORLD IS OUR

LABORATORY

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Photo by wuestenigel

Over the past year, faculty from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering have conducted research that helps us to better understand the world around us—from tiny microbes to massive ocean waves. Read on for a look at some of the interesting research produced by our CEE faculty.

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Rolling Back Energy Regulations

Loosening restrictions threaten progress against harmful ozone

Pollutants from coal-fired power plants help make ground-level ozone, and a warming world exacerbates that. Rollbacks of U.S. energy regulations may speed climate change, keep pollutants coming, and thus slow the fight against harmful ozone.

Currently, 30 percent of the U.S. population lives with ozone levels that exceed government health standards. Though past environmental regulations have vastly helped clean the air and put the U.S. on a positive trajectory to reduce pollutants — including ozone — policy rollbacks could slow the progress and even reverse it, according to a study led by Armistead G. Russell, Regents Professor and Howard T. Tellepsen Chair in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Continuing progress against ozone would pay off in better health and finances: The more ozone in the air, the more cases of respiratory illness and the higher the cost of meeting ozone level targets.

“Additional ozone is tough to control technologically. The costs would be very high — tens of billions of dollars,” said Russell, a principal investigator on the study. “In the meantime, more people would die than otherwise would have.”

The researchers published their results in One Earth, a Cell Press journal, in October 2019. The research was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and by the National Science Foundation.

The study focuses on ground-level ozone people breathe to the detriment of their health, which should not be confused with the stratospheric ozone that protects us from the sun’s harmful radiation.

In the last three years, various energy policies have been loosened, which should result in raised carbon dioxide emissions and continued emissions of ozone precursors in years to come, the study’s authors said.

“Incentives are being retired like production and investment tax credits, which have been very influential in solar and wind,” said Marilyn Brown, a Regents Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy and a principal investigator on the study. “The Investment Tax Credit gives a 30 percent tax reduction for investments in solar or wind farms or the purchase of solar rooftop panels by homeowners. The Production Tax Credit for utilities reduces tax liabilities by 23 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by solar, wind or other renewable energy sources.”

—Ben Brumfield Read more faculty research at: ce.gatech.edu

28 Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Power of the Hypar Researchers study the stuctural properties of origami

While perhaps not as iconic as the paper crane, the hypar origami with its sweeping opposing arcs and saddle shape has long been popular for artists working in the paper folding tradition.

Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo are looking at the shape with an eye toward leveraging its structural properties, hoping to find ways to harness its bistability to build multifunctional devices or metamaterials.

For a study reported in September 2019 in the journal Nature Communications and supported by the National Science Foundation, the researchers examined first whether the popular origami pattern that resembles the geometric hyperbolic paraboloid – or hypar – had the same physical characteristics as its geometric counterpart and tried to understand how its folds contribute to the formation of the pattern.

“The hyperbolic paraboloid is a striking pattern that has been used in architectural designs the world over,” said Glaucio Paulino, the Raymond Allen Jones Chair in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “As an origami pattern, it has structural bistability which could be harnessed for metamaterials used in energy trapping or other microelectronic devices.”

Structural bistability refers to the origami

Professor Glaucio Paulino holds hypar origami

pattern’s ability to find a resting equilibrium in two different states – when the saddle shape reverses on itself. That capability could enable devices based on the origami’s structure to reconfigure to point the arcs in opposite directions on the fly.

Like any other origami, the pattern starts with a flat sheet of paper, which is then folded along concentric squares. Those folds combine to pull the tips of the paper in opposite directions, forming the opposing arcs of a hyperbolic paraboloid.

To understand more about the mechanisms that creates the saddle shapes, the researchers created a theoretical model that could serve to predict the behavior of the origami, and their analysis reinforced the idea that the structure exhibited the same characteristics of its geometric counterpart.

“One of the really interesting things we found was that the folds of concentric squares did not have to be uniform in their offsets in order to form the hypar origami,” said Ke Liu, a former graduate student at Georgia Tech and now a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. “So some squares could be quite close together and others farther apart and still the overall shape would be a hyperbolic paraboloid.”

—Josh Brown Read more faculty research at: ce.gatech.edu

Photo by Allison Carter

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Withstanding Waves

Research on large waves could lessen impact When cyclones or other massive oceanic storms make landfall, their giant waves batter coastlines and sometimes cause widespread damage.

Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed months of data of large nearshore waves to provide new insights that could help improve the designs of a variety of coastal structures from seaports to seawalls to better withstand destructive waves.

In the study published in October 2019 in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers report combining a mathematical model to describe the formation of large waves with real-world measurements taken in shallow waters just off of the coast of Ireland, where waves have been reported to hit the shore with enough force to move 100-ton rocks.

“In this work we have analyzed real data in order to show that, over the course of several months measuring different storm events, we find that the extreme waves that we have observed in the coastal data tend on average to be smaller than the rogue waves we have observed in deep water, but they have similar characteristics,” said Francesco Fedele, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“These large nearshore waves are still caused by constructive interference – the effect of waves coming in all different directions and basically meeting at one point and piling up to form a large wave, and by second order nonlinearities that distort the sinusoidal shape of waves to have sharper crests and shallower troughs,” Fedele said.

The research team also included M. Aziz Tayfun, professor emeritus from Kuwait University, Frederic Dias, a professor at the University College Dublin, and James Herterich, a postdoctoral associate at the University College Dublin.

In the study, which was sponsored by Science Foundation Ireland, the researchers analyzed measurements captured by an acoustic doppler current profiler (ADCP) device that was deployed for several months on the ocean floor off Killard Point during Spring 2015 and off the Aran Islands during Spring 2017.

—Josh Brown Read more faculty research at: ce.gatech.edu Photo by Frederic Dias 30

Sub-surface Soil Exploration Advanced robot will improve sensing technology An interdisciplinary research group from Georgia Tech has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to design an advanced selfpropelled robot to explore the subsurface and record a range of signals as it advances.

The project is led by principal investigator Chloé Arson, an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The research team includes faculty from across the Institute, including fellow Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor David Frost, Associate Professor Polo Chau from the School of Computational Science and Engineering, Professor Daniel Goldman from the School of Physics and Assistant Professor Frank Hammond from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

The Georgia Tech researchers will collaborate with four professors at Imperial College London for the three-year project. The grant, which is co-funded by the NSF and UK Research and Innovation, has a total budget of $1,765,477, including $800,000 for Georgia Tech. The joint project formally began on Jan. 1, 2020 at both Georgia Tech and Imperial College London.

The project aims to develop a multi-functional modular sensing system known as the Burrowing Robot with Integrated Sensing System (BRISS).

Most current geotechnical probes enter the soil vertically and record signals from one of several sensors that typically measure resistance force, fluid

A rendering of the research group's proposed multi-functional modular sensing system known as the Burrowing Robot with Integrated Sensing System (BRISS)

Photo by Miguel Vera

pressure or shear wave velocity. The result is a set of measurements that provide information from just the localized region around the probe.

In contrast, the proposed BRISS would incorporate a novel multi-sensor system and have the ability to advance in any direction vertically or horizontally, propel itself through the subsurface, and incorporate machine learning algorithms to instantaneously analyze data and implement investigation changes while soundings are in progress.

Researchers hope that the minimally-tethered robot will pave the way toward fully autonomous, wireless and multi-directional subsurface sensing technology that would ultimately revolutionize fields such as deep sediment characterization and extra-terrestrial exploration.

“This grant will support the development of a smart suite of tools to explore, characterize and model the subsurface with more accuracy and reliability than ever before,” Arson said. “We have the opportunity to push the boundaries of current knowledge in tribology, computational geomechanics, soft robotics, control systems, signal processing and machine learning to achieve our ambitious objectives. This collaboration between three colleges at Georgia Tech and three departments at Imperial College London provides a fantastic foundation to rethink subsurface characterization.”

Read more faculty research at: ce.gatech.edu 31

Rising Tundra Temperatures Effect on microbes could exacerbate climate change

Rising temperatures in the tundra of the Earth’s northern latitudes could affect microbial communities in ways likely to increase their production of greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, a new study of experimentally warmed Alaskan soil suggests.

About half of the world’s total underground carbon is stored in the soils of these frigid, northern latitudes. That is more than twice the amount of carbon currently found in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but until now most of it has been locked up in the very cold soil. The new study, which relied on metagenomics to analyze changes in the microbial communities being experimentally warmed, could heighten concerns about how the release of this carbon may exacerbate climate change.

“We saw that microbial communities respond quite rapidly – within four or five years – to even modest levels of warming,” said Kostas T. Konstantinidis, the paper’s corresponding author and the Richard C. Tucker Professer in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Microbial species and their genes involved in carbon dioxide and methane release increased their abundance in response to the warming treatment. We were surprised to see such a response to even mild warming.”

The study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation and reported July 2019 in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from the University of Oklahoma, Michigan State University and Northern Arizona University collaborated with Georgia Tech on the study.

The study provides quantitative information about how rapidly microbial communities responded to the warming at critical depths and highlights the dominant microbial metabolisms and groups of organisms that are responding to warming in the tundra. The work underscores the importance of accurately representing the role of soil microbes in climate models.

The research began in September 2008 at a moist, acidic tundra area in the interior of Alaska near Denali National Park. Six experimental blocks were created, and in each block, two snow fences were constructed about five meters apart in the winter to control snow cover. Thicker snow cover in the winter served as an insulator, creating slightly elevated temperatures — about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the experimental plots.

Other than the temperature difference, the soil conditions were similar in the experimental and control plots. Soil cores were taken from the experimental and control plots at two different depths at two different times: 1.5 years after the experiment began, and 4.5 years after the start. Microbial DNA was extracted from the cores and sequenced using the Genomics Core at Georgia Tech.

Read more faculty research at: ce.gatech.edu 32

—John Toon Photo by Paxson Woelber

Renewable Natural Gas

At scale, RNG systems could be climate intensive Renewable natural gas is envisioned by some policy makers and energy strategists as a climate-friendly energy source that could be a substitute for fossil fuels to reduce our carbon footprint.

But research from Assistant Professor Emily Grubert finds that renewable natural gas (RNG) may not be a good climate solution in the long run. In a paper published in Environmental Research Letters, Grubert says that while promising, RNG has significant drawbacks, which include leaking methane into the atmosphere and competing with other lower-emissions resources.

RNG is essentially pure methane, usually derived from biogenic or captured carbon dioxide. What differentiates it from fossil natural gas (FNG) is that it utilizes greenhouse gases that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere—such as methane released from waste decomposition in a landfill.

But RNG is only carbon negative if in fact the methane is truly captured. Grubert says the amount of capturable waste methane available is very limited, and wouldn’t be able meet our current energy demands and serve as a replacement for FNG. Some policy makers have proposed investments in reconfiguring the natural gas infrastructure to accommodate RNG, which could be supplemented with additional methane from other sources.

Grubert’s research shows that even small leaks from the existing natural gas infrastructure would be significant because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas.

While RNG is less climate intensive than FNG, Grubert argues that it’s not the energy solution we should be focusing on.

A decade ago, the climate community talked about natural gas as a bridge fuel that would serve as a cleaner, albeit imperfect, alternative to coal. While renewable natural gas is an even cleaner alternative, it’s not zero carbon and shouldn’t be where we focus our time and resources.

“If this is something we could do temporarily that didn’t cost that much, that’s exciting,” Grubert said. “But much like we talk about FNG as a bridge fuel away from coal, there has to be an end date on RNG to get to a zero-carbon fuel system.”

Read more faculty research at: ce.gatech.edu

Photo by softytop1000

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AN INVISIBLE ENEMY Civil and Environmental Engineering researchers are tackling the global Covid-19 pandemic from all angles Covid-19 has affected just about every aspect of our lives. In our efforts to combat the highly contagious virus, we have changed the way we work, the way we study, the we travel, and more.

Civil and environmental engineers are uniquely prepared to analyze every aspect of this global crisis. In fact, it’s in our School’s mission statement: We are leaders in systems-level thinking and technological innovation that define and solve complex problems at the interface of built, natural, and social systems.

The coronavirus pandemic illustrates the breadth of expertise held by our CEE faculty. From studying air and water quality, to telecommuting, transit ridership and infrastructure resilience, researchers from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering have mobilized quickly to help find solutions to our current crisis and study the lessons that can be applied to the future.

Read on to see how these engineers are stepping up to help us make sense of this unprecedented global phenomenon.

Photo by Allison Carter 34

Wastewater-Based Epidemiology Joe Brown, Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professsor

Photo by Gary Meek

Associate Professor Joe Brown is among 60 researchers who have created a global collaborative to learn more about the spread of Covid-19 through wastewater.

In a paper published in Environmental Science & Technology, the researchers explained that RNA from the coronavirus is shed in the feces of those infected with Covid-19. This allows researchers to survey sewage for virus RNA, a process they refer to as wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE).

Covid-19 RNA has been detected in wastewater during the early stages of outbreaks, meaning that wastewater-based epidemiology could be a powerful tool for alerting communities of an outbreak before it gets out of control.

What has made the coronavirus so insidious is that it can be spread by people who are infected but exhibit no symptoms. However, wastewater samples provide a community aggregate that shows evidence of the virus – whether individuals are symptomatic or not.

Brown explained that the researchers are pairing their virus RNA measurements with available

Joe Brown

Covid-19 testing data from the same areas to evaluate whether wastewater signals can provide an advance warning of an outbreak.

“Wastewater detection of viral RNA can give us a four-to-seven-day lead time on increases or decreases in infection, since shedding of the virus in fecal waste begins before symptoms appear,” Brown said.

Brown has been working with colleagues from Georgia Tech and Emory University to collect samples at sewage treatment plants in the Atlanta metro area since March 2020.

“Our approach has the potential to fill gaps in testing, and we’re excited about the prospect of applying these methods over smaller scales, like for long-term care facilities, prisons, schools, or dormitories on campuses, where monitoring is still limited and early detection of impending outbreaks would be highly valuable,” Brown said.

Brown is collaborating with a large, dynamic, and growing group of scientists, engineers, and public health professionals on methods and interpretation of results, both across the US and internationally.

A major platform for collaboration and communication on this topic is being led by Aaron Bivins, CE 07, MS EnvE 15, Ph.D. EnvE 19, who was part of Brown’s research group at Tech and now serves as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame.

Brown said it has been a meaningful experience to work together with so many other researchers around the world.

“It’s been exciting. We’re part of this global effort to bring our best science to understand and control this virus, and the stakes could not be any higher. I’m hopeful that our work can be part of the solution,” Brown said.

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Photo by Hasan Zulic

Wastewater Disinfection

Professor Ching-Hua Huang, Turnipseed Family Chair Environmental Engineering Professor Ching-Hua Huang is devoting some of her research efforts to address one of the unknown effects of the coronavirus pandemic: how thoroughly the virus is treated in wastewater.

Huang’s research group is working on a National Science Foundationfunded project to investigate disinfection processes for wastewater treatment.

“We are very interested in knowing how well the wastewater treatment process can handle coronavirus,” Huang said.

Currently, chlorine is the most commonly used disinfectant in wastewater treatment. While it is effective, chlorine also creates harmful byproducts.

So Huang and her research group are studying the effectiveness of organic peroxides, a group of chemicals with fewer toxic byproducts that can also be good disinfectants. Huang is working with peracetic acid in particular.

Peracetic acid is already approved in the U.S. for wastewater and stormwater treatment and is also used as a disinfectant in sectors including food processing, the medical field, and the paper and pulp industry.

In published studies using bacteria, Huang and her students have found that combining the peracetic acid with UV light results in very effective disinfection. Currently, Huang’s research group is exploring how effective this disinfection strategy could be against viruses as well. Her group is investigating different bacteriophages, which are suitable surrogates for the coronavirus and other types of viruses.

The goal of her study is to advance the fundamental knowledge on organic peroxides and develop better treatment processes to mitigate water pollution to protect public health and environmental sustainability.

So far, Huang says the disinfection studies are very promising for the coronavirus surrogate dispersed in wastewater.

“The results we learn from them will be very useful,” Huang said.

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Ching-Hua Huang

Monitoring Air Quality

Photo by Sean MacEntee

Assistant Professor Jennifer Kaiser Adjunct Professor Sally Ng

The airline industry has undoubtedly been one of the hardest-hit by the coronavirus as people abandoned trips on tightly packed airplanes to avoid exposure.

This almost immediate world-wide drop in air travel in early 2020 presented researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to study how emissions from air travel affect the air we breathe.

Assistant Professor Jennifer Kaiser and Adjunct Professor Sally Ng have set up two measurement sites to track changes in air quality resulting from the Covid-19 response. ​At the first site, on the Ford Environmental Science &Technology rooftop lab at Georgia Tech, Kaiser and Ng are using a set of instruments to make chemically detailed measurements of air pollution, allowing them to dig deeper into reaction mechanisms and test our current understanding. This measurement site is representative of the average air quality close to the urban core.

The second site is located near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. There, Kaiser is using a more limited set of instruments to target nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde. These two pollutants are visible from satellite-based instruments and can be used to map air quality.

“Satellites see a hot-spot of nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde right at the Atlanta airport,” Kaiser said. “The instruments we’ve deployed are designed to see if ground-based observations track with satellite-based observations. Changes in aviation traffic during Covid-19 allow us to observe a large range of emissions and concentrations in a short period of time.”

Often cited as the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson has undergone a dramatic decrease in air traffic in 2020.

For example, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that the total number of flights at Hartsfield-Jackson International declined 73 percent in April 2020 compared with April 2019, according to the airport’s monthly air traffic report. The Atlanta airport handled 20,406 flights in April 2020, down from 75,669 in April 2019.

Kaiser said their measurements over the summer show this pattern has made an impact.

Observations of nitrogen dioxide over Atlanta reveal that the airport hot-spot is no longer as distinct—the overall magnitude has decreased, but also, the spatial pattern has dramatically changed.

While Kaiser and Ng still need to analyze the data, they report that air quality has indeed improved during 2020.

“We’ve had less days with poor air quality this summer compared to the previous five-year average,” Kaiser said.

Jennifer Kaiser

Sally Ng

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Telecommuting Past, Present and Future Patricia Mokhtarian, Susan G. and Christopher D. Pappas Professor Patricia Mokhtarian, the Susan G. and Christopher D. Pappas Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was uniquely prepared to analyze the nation’s massive shift to telecommuting due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Mokhtarian has been studying the adoption and travel-related impacts of information and communication technologies, including teleworking, since 1982. She has also authored more than 40 peerreviewed articles related to teleworking and recently served as chair of the International Association for Travel Behavior Research.

“I have been studying teleworking nearly 40 years now, and during those past four decades there has been a steady stream of predictions about the pending ubiquity of working from home,” Mokhtarian said.

There have also been a variety of events during her career, whether natural or human-caused, that have led to increases in teleworking such as transit strikes, earthquakes, Olympic Games, terrorist attacks and bridge collapses.

“It seems that history repeats itself with each one of these extreme events,” Mokhtarian said. “We have lots of people teleworking during the event and the aftermath and there’s lots of chatter about how ‘now that everyone sees how great teleworking is, it’s going to take off rapidly.’”

But the reality is that aside from these extreme events, the percentage of the workforce that telecommutes full-time has remained small over the years—just 5.3 percent reported that they usually work from home, as recently as the 2018 American Community Survey.

Due to Covid-19, those numbers have spiked rapidly. Depending on the poll, roughly 40-60 percent of the workforce reported working remotely during the spring of 2020.

So many, including writers from major publications, have turned to Mokhtarian for her prognostication: Will this time be different?

“Some key reasons for the slow adoption of working from home have not gone away,” Mokhtarian says.

While there are many benefits to telework—no commute, more flexibility— working from home presents constraints and challenges for others, such as isolation or a lack of comfortable work space.

Mokhtarian points out that it’s also important to remember that about 40 percent of workers, such as cashiers and hair stylists, don’t have the option to telecommute.

“The likely reality is that we will not go back to the way things were, but we won’t remain at these emergency levels of teleworking indefinitely,” Mokhtarian said. “I believe if nothing else the pandemic will have given us a very clear idea of the pros and cons of teleworking for employees and organizations.”

Patricia Mokhtarian

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Photo courtesy of Atlanta Brand Box

Photo by Daniel Rashid

Photo by Vlada Karpovich

Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy

Transportation planning must be comprehensive for long-term sustainability. The rapid spread of the coronavirus revealed how critical threats can pose risks to sustainable development. While mass transit has long been considered a sustainable option for reducing carbon emissions, the pandemic has shown mass transit’s vulnerability: lost ridership as people have fled transit to avoid contracting the virus.

Lessons in Resilience Professor Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy What happens when something comes along and challenges our bedrock assumptions about systems in society?

Professor Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy studies infrastructure resilience—the ability of critical systems to resist and recover quickly from major disruptions, adapt to changing circumstances and bounce back more quickly from disasters—be they natural, humancaused, or in this case, viral.

In April, Amekudzi-Kennedy led the development of an article that considers the infrastructure and sustainable development implications of the Covid-19 pandemic, along with colleagues from Georgia Tech, Purdue University and Arizona State University.

The researchers examined the pandemic through the lens of transportation infrastructure and came up with five lessons that can be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic:

We need multiple modes of transportation to be most resilient. Covid-19 is teaching us that perhaps it is not so much about one mode versus another, or which transportation mode is best from only one perspective. Rather, there is wisdom in planning for and investing in a robust multimodal transportation system that offers multiple convenient and costeffective choices.

Less can be more when it comes to travel and resiliency. The rapid national movement to teleworking and remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic is causing many to ask questions about how essential it is to travel back and forth on a daily basis for work and school. More people working remotely in the long run could lead to less congestion, traffic and pollution. However, the digital divide means that not all people can choose to work from home.

Economic capital is key. The authors cite the more than $2 trillion U.S. coronavirus relief package passed by federal lawmakers as evidence of the need for economic resiliency in the face of critical threats to sustainability.

Social capital is just as crucial. Covid‐19 has demonstrated the importance of the global community mobilizing and acting quickly around sustainable development risks. Whether in the case of fast‐moving disasters like Covid‐19 or slow-moving disasters like climate change, it’s important for people to work together before it’s too late.

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STUDENTS ABROAD

CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL

ENGINEERS ABROAD

In the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, we encourage our students to seek out global experiences that will shape their educational and personal growth on the path to becoming engineering leaders of the 21st Century.

These transformative experiences are within reach for so many CEE students thanks to the Joe S. Mundy Global Learning Endowment, which provides students with travel funds for immersive 40 36

experiences in new cultures through study abroad, research in the field, and international work, volunteerism, and exploration. Though the Covid-19 pandemic cut many travel plans short, 14 undergraduates enjoyed life-changing experiences this academic year. From research in Costa Rica to mountain climbing in Bolivia and driving through Iceland, they’ve shared their photos with us so we can live vicariously through their adventures.

Students show school spirit in Costa Rica (Photo by Isabelle Musmanno)

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2 (1) Isabelle Musmanno at the La Selva Biological Research Station in Costa Rica (2) Corey Whitlock ice climbing in preparation for climbing Huayna Potosi, a mountain in Bolivia (3) Ishita Mathur poses at the Glenorchy visitors center in New Zealand

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1

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(1) Corey Whitlock working to build a map of the community in La Paz, Bolivia (2) Whitlock catching the sunrise on a morning hike (3) Jannifer Hong takes a break while traveling in Iceland (4) Aaron Weil in London at the iconic Abbey Road crossing

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4

FACULTY ACCOLADES

Amekudzi-Kennedy Honored for Curriculum Innovation

Professor Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy has been named the 2020 winner of Georgia Tech’s Curriculum Innovation Award.

This award is given annually to one faculty member for improving the quality of education at Georgia Tech through pedagogical and curricular innovation.

Amekudzi-Kennedy is the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s associate chair for global engineering leadership and entrepreneurship. She was selected for the Curriculum Innovation Award in recognition of her work leading the development and implementation of the Global Engineering Leadership Minor (GELM).

The program, which is administered through CEE, is one of three tracks in the Institute’s Minor in Leadership Studies, alongside business management and public policy tracks.

New Research Center Will Study Mine Tailings and Industrial Waste

Assistant Professor Jorge Macedo established The Tailings and Industrial Waste Engineering (TAILENG) research center, a consortium of faculty at four universities: Georgia Tech, Colorado State University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Illinois. The center will be dedicated to studying mine tailings and industrial waste in an effort to build safer waste storage systems and reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failures. Through fundamental and applied research, TAILENG will work to: improve the resilience, safety, and sustainability of infrastructure in the mining and power industries, with a focus on innovative and economical technologies; advance the state of the art and practice in the design, operation, and closure of tailings and industrial waste storage facilities; and improve the understanding of anthropogenic geomaterials.

Paulino’s Research Recognized with Medals from Three Organizations

Professor Glaucio Paulino has been selected as the winner of three medals in 2020 that recognize his pioneering origami and tensegrity engineering research and contributions to the field of mechanics.

He received the Raymond D. Mindlin Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Daniel C. Drucker Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and The J.N. Reddy Medal from the Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures journal.

He is the first professor from Georgia Tech to receive each of the three medals. Paulino, who holds the Raymond Allen Jones Chair in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has more than 240 scholarly publications and has attracted international attention for his work on computational mechanics, topology optimization and origami engineering.

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STUDENT ACCOLADES

Singh Wins National Award for Women in Transportation

Ph.D. student Prerna Singh has been selected for a national scholarship for graduate students in transportation.

Singh, a third year Ph.D. student and graduate research assistant in the Infrastructure Research Group, was selected out of more than 50 candidates to win the WTS Leadership Legacy Scholarship.

The Leadership Legacy Fund was established to honor the past, present and future leaders of WTS—a group for women in the transportation industry—by awarding an annual scholarship to female graduate students pursuing careers in transportation.

Each year, the scholarship provides a $5,000 award to a young woman working toward a graduate degree in transportation or a related field.

Candidates must demonstrate leadership skills and an active commitment to community service.

Georgia Tech’s ASCE Chapter Named Distinguished Chapter for Region

The Georgia Tech chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers was named the 2020 ASCE Distinguished Chapter for the region.

The honor is awarded annually to the most outstanding student organization in each region. Region 5 is comprised of chapters from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Puerto Rico.

“Receiving this award is just a small testament to how dedicated our members and fellow officers are in making an impact in the civil engineering world,” said Peter Psaltakis, a civil engineering major and GT ASCE Conference Chair. “From working hard on the projects and competitions for our annual conference to socializing and networking with fellow students, faculty, and corporate sponsors, the members in our chapter always strive to help grow and better our student chapter on a day-to-day basis.”

Luo Honored with Graduate Student Award by American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society recognized Civil and Environmental Engineering doctoral student Cong Luo for his research productivity and academic performance.

Luo is one of 20 students nationwide to receive the Environmental Chemistry Graduate Student Award from the Society.

“It is definitely the highlight of my graduate career,” said Luo. “I have always felt like ACS was such a prestigious community to be a part of.”

Luo’s research focuses on the elimination of pharmaceutical pollution in wastewater.

“Equal access to safe water is a basic human right and an essential condition for a healthy life no matter where you live,” said Luo. “I hope that my research work in water treatment could bring the world a little bit closer to that.”

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STUDENT ACCOLADES

Environmental Engineering Team Places 2nd in International Design Competition A team from Georgia Tech took the No. 2 spot at the Water Environment Federation’s international student design competition.

The team created a design report and presented their results in Chicago in September 2019.

The design was a project for the Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources. The work for the project initially began in Professor of the Practice John Koon’s environmental engineering senior design course. The team evaluated the use of treated municipal wastewater as a source of drinking water that Gwinnett County could use to supplement its water supply. The team was comprised of recent environmental engineering graduates Claire Anderson, Samuel Boyce, Blake Linder, and Eleanor Thomas. The Georgia Tech group was advised by a team from engineering firm Black & Veatch.

Afolabi Awarded Sloan Scholarship

Moyosore Afolabi has been selected to receive a scholarship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Minority Ph.D. program.

Afolabi is a Ph.D. student in environmental engineering and an NSF graduate research fellow whose research focuses on the development of novel membrane filters for the removal of emerging contaminants from wastewater. Afolabi is from Houston, Texas, and received her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

The Sloan Foundation’s Minority Ph.D. program was established in 1995 to help diversify the Ph.D. degree-holding workforce in the United States by increasing the recruitment, retention and graduation of underrepresented minority doctoral students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Georgia Tech is one of eight University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring that are currently funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Schreiber Named SMART Scholar

Ph.D. Student Trent Schreiber has received a SMART Scholarship from the U.S. Department of Defense.

The Science Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) scholarship is a scholarship-for-service program established to enhance the Department of Defense workforce with talented, innovative and brilliant scientists, engineers and researchers.

SMART Scholars enter the program to pursue their education in some of the leading STEM fields currently in high demand by the United States Government. Following graduation, these scholars work within labs and agencies of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Department of Defense to conduct research related to national security.

The SMART scholarship covers full tuition and fees, allowances for books and health insurance, an annual stipend, and paid summer internships.

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ALUMNI ACCOLADES

Shailendra Tapped to Serve as Georgia Board of Regents Chair

Sachin Shailendra, CE 01, was elected to serve as chair of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.

With members appointed by the governor, the Board of Regents serves as the governing and management authority for the state of Georgia’s 26 public higher education institutions: four research universities, four comprehensive universities, nine state universities, and nine state colleges.

“An outstanding Georgia Tech alumnus, with strong family ties to Georgia Tech, Regent Shailendra has a unique appreciation of how public higher education can transform lives and strengthen our community,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera.

Josh Rowan Named Head of Atlanta DOT

Josh Rowan, CE 96, has been chosen to lead the city of Atlanta’s newly formed Department of Transportation.

Rowan previously served as general manager for Atlanta’s Renew | TSPLOST Programs and has more than 24 years of experience delivering capital construction programs. He was appointed by Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to lead the agency created to accelerate and diversify the projects that the city delivers for residents—including better options for getting around Atlanta safely, affordably and equitably.

The new agency will manage a range of transportation improvements— from roadway maintenance to sidewalk and bike lane construction to upgrading streetlights and traffic signals. ATLDOT’s mission is to make streets more accessible to people of different ages, backgrounds, and abilities.

Two CEE Alumni Win Engineer of the Year Awards

Anita Atkinson, CE 00, and John Pierson, MS EnvE 93, were among the seven impressive engineers selected to receive the Georgia Society of Professional Engineers’ annual Engineer of the Year Awards.

Atkinson, vice president of engineering and surveying at Patterson & Dewar Engineers Inc., was named the 2020 Engineer of the Year in Private Practice.

A 2000 civil engineering graduate, Atkinson has worked for the last 20 years designing, managing and leading engineering work in the area of electric utilities infrastructure. Pierson, principal research engineer at Georgia Tech Research Institute, is the 2020 Engineer of the Year in Industry.

Pierson’s work at GTRI focuses on food safety and quality. He is an environmental engineer focused on industrial treatment processes, remediation, restoration and stormwater.

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By Sabrina Tongren, Engineering Georgia

Influential Women in Engineering

Georgia Tech civil and environmental engineers are well represented on Engineering Georgia’s third annual list of the 100 most influential women in Georgia.

For the second year in a row, two members of the School’s External Advisory Board made the list: Meg Pirkle, MS CE 97, and board chair Emmy Montanye, CE 82.

Pirkle and Montanye are joined by 16 other alumnae from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. They include women in private practice and public service, entrepreneurs, and rising stars.

The magazine built its list from the recommendations of peers, industry leaders and its own editorial board. “These influential women not only serve the industry in remarkable ways, but many of them also work to mentor and empower other female professionals in the architecture, engineering and construction world,” writer Heather Collins noted.

Kerrie Boyette, P.E. | Transportation Practice Leader, KCI Technologies (CE 99) Lenor Bromberg, P.E., F.ASCE | Deputy Director Community Development, City of Roswell (CE 96) Marlo Clowers, P.E., DBIA | Senior Project Manager, Georgia Department of Transportation (CE 95) Rebecca Collins Atkins, P.E. | Executive Vice President, Aviation Division Manager, Croy Engineering (CE 01) Annie Gillespie, P.E. | Chief Engineer, State Road and Tollway Authority (CE 05, MS EnvE 08) Lorraine Green, P.E., NACE CP4 | President, Pond (CHE 84, MS EnvE 93) Kate Henry, P.E. | Partner and Vice President of Aviation Services, Aulick Engineering (CE 08) Jenny Jenkins, P.E. | Marketing Lead, VHB (CE 99) Karen Jenkins, P.E., AIA | Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Shear Structural (M Arch 92, MS CE 93) Daveitta Jenkins Knight, P.E. | Georgia Transportation Operations Manager, Division Vice President; Jacobs Engineering Group (CE 94) Karyn Matthews, P.E. | Senior Transportation Engineer, Arcadis (CE 02) Emmy Montanye, P.E., LEED AP | Principal, Kimley-Horn (CE 82) Nicole Parris, P.E. | Project Director, Atkins (CE 98) Margaret “Meg” Pirkle, P.E. | Chief Engineer, Georgia Department of Transportation (MS CE 97) Tyler Richards | Director, Department of Water Resources, Gwinnett County (MS CE 82) Kellie Sak, P.E. | Regional Vice President, ZAPATA (MS CE 05)

Honorees include Executive Advisory Board Chair Emmy Montanye, CE 82, and board member Meg Pirkle, MS CE 97.

Mindy Sanders, P.E. | Senior Project Manager, Pont Engineering (MS CE 01) Angela Snyder, P.E. | Practice Area Leader, Transportation, CHA Consulting, Inc. (CE 04) 47

Advice for Leadership and Life In three decades of leadership, John Huff, CE 68, has helped Oceaneering International Inc. become the premier organization in underwater technologies. He grew the business from a small diving company to a highly successful corporation with pioneering technologies that have been used to explore deep ocean basins and outer space.

He has achieved a lot in the business world, and he says that understanding people is a key to leadership and success.

Huff returned to the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering for the Kenneth Hyatt Distinguished Speaker Series on Oct. 3, 2019. Huff’s demeanor was warm and casual as he shared stories and anecdotes from his life and career to illustrate what it means to be a leader with around 100 CEE students and distinguished guests.

“Leaders and followers need to have a common vision of what they are doing,” Huff said. “A leader is someone who sets expectations of followers and helps followers achieve expectations.”

What’s important about that, Huff said, is that not everyone you lead will need the same kind of help to succeed. Some people may require motivation, while others will need more knowledge to achieve their goals.

In the same vein, Huff said it’s important to remember what it’s like to be both a leader and a follower.

“In your lifetime, you’re not always going to be the leader.

Many times, you’re going to be the follower. You need to learn both sides of the equation,” Huff said.

After graduating from Georgia Tech in 1968, Huff began his career working for two pioneering offshore drilling companies: The Offshore Company and Zapata Offshore. He later joined Western Oceanic and worked his way up to chairman and CEO of the company, where he developed a detailed knowledge of offshore operations through his work around the globe.

John Huff

KENNETH HYATT DISTINGUISHED LEADERSHIP SPEAKER

From left: Former Georgia Tech first lady Val Peterson, Karen and John Huff School Chair Donald Webster, Karen Huff, Professor Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy, Hyatt speaker John Huff and President Emeritus G.P. "Bud" Peterson

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Fall 2019 Hyatt Lecture

“In your lifetime, you’re not always going to be the leader. Many times, you’re going to be the follower.

You need to learn both sides of the equation.”

Building a Career at the Intersection of Engineering and Entrepreneurship “Engineering and entrepreneurship are like children—you don’t love one over the other, you love them both.”

When it comes to leadership, Bill Higginbotham, CE 76, has learned many valuable lessons from the 13 businesses he’s founded over the course of his long and successful career.

Actually, that number only includes his “real” businesses— in geotechnical consulting, energy and environmental management, construction, venture capital and more. But Higginbotham is a natural entrepreneur who has started businesses over the course of his life doing everything from cleaning pools to landscaping to buying and selling vintage sports cars.

“I have a low boredom threshold,” Higginbotham said. “I never wanted to be the guy who just did one thing.”

He believes strongly that all business opportunities are learning opportunities, and great things happen at the intersection of engineering and entrepreneurship.

On Feb. 6, 2020, Higginbotham shared the wisdom he’s acquired over the course of his varied career as the featured speaker for the Kenneth Hyatt Distinguished Leadership Speaker Series.

Over the past decade, Higginbotham has become an active alumnus who’s contributed significantly to the School through both service and philanthropy.

In January 2020, Higginbotham began his latest involvement at the School: co-teaching a course called Innovation & Entrepreneurship in Civil Engineering Systems. He believes all CEE students should graduate with basic business knowledge to make them more well-rounded candidates when they enter the job market. He hopes to inspire more entrepreneurial opportunities within the School to complement the excellent engineering curriculum that’s already in place.

“Engineering and entrepreneurship are like children— you don’t love one over the other, you love them both,” Higginbotham said.

Bill Higginbotham

KENNETH HYATT DISTINGUISHED LEADERSHIP SPEAKER

From left: Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor David Frost, Professor Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy, Hyatt speaker Bill Higginbotham, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Karen and John Huff School Chair Donald Webster.

Spring 2020 Hyatt Lecture

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Kenneth Hyatt Distinguished Leadership Speaker Series OUR 2020-2021 SPEAKERS

Stacie Sire, CE 96

Director of Structures Engineering, Boeing Commercial Airplanes

Reginald DesRoches

Rice University Provost and Former Karen and John Huff School Chair

The Hyatt Distinguished Leadership Speaker Series taps the School’s broad alumni base to bring a distinguished leader to campus each fall and spring who can share wisdom and insight with the School’s students and the wider Georgia Tech community.

It is made possible by the generous support of Kenneth Hyatt, CE 62, MS IM 66.

This year the Hyatt Distinguished Leadership Speaker Series will be held virtually.

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CE.GATECH.EDU/HYATT

New board members from left to right: Alejandro Char, Knox Tull, Barbara Sloan, Jacquline Quinn, Cayman James and Evan Haren.

New Members Bring Range of Experiences and Perspectives to Executive Advisory Board The new members of the School’s Executive Advisory Board reflect the diversity of its graduates and the breadth of options that are possible with a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The six board members selected for this year’s cohort represent alumni from different generations, geographic locations in the United States and abroad, genders, races and career paths.

“We are excited to have such an accomplished group of alumni join our advisory board,” said Karen and John Huff School Chair Don Webster. “We are committed to ensuring that our board consists of members who bring a diversity of experience and perspectives to benefit the School.”

The Executive Advisory Board is a group of 30 alumni and industry leaders who counsel the School’s leadership on everything from curriculum to alumni outreach.

The six new members were welcomed to the CEE Executive Advisory Board by 35 of their peers—a record number of current and emeritus members who attended the fall 2019 meeting.

We welcome the 2019-2020 cohort to the Executive Advisory Board and thank them for their first year of service to the CEE community.

Alejandro Char, MS CE 93, is the former mayor of Baranquilla, Colombia. In addition to his years in public service as a councilman and mayor, he has also been general manager of a construction and urban development company.

Evan Haren Jr., P.E., CE 77, is the president and CEO of Haren Construction Co. Inc., an environmental engineering and construction company based in Etowah, Tenn., that builds wastewater treatment plants, pumping stations, pipelines and water treatment plants.

Cayman James, CE 99, MS EnvE 01, is a project manager for Jacobs Engineering Group in Atlanta. James is a Registered Professional Engineer and specializes in environmental compliance and remediation.

Jacqueline Quinn, CE 89, is the NASA-KSC Liaison for the NASA Kennedy Space Center.

Her work experience spans from environmental technology to lunar instrument development. She is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Barbara Sloan, MS CE 77, is a retired principal at Cambridge Systematics Inc. Sloan has more than 40 years of technical and managerial experience in transportation planning and engineering, including both highway and transit modes. She lives in Baden, Penn.

Knox W. Tull Jr., MS CE 72, is the president and co-founder of Jackson and Tull, a technology company that provides services in the areas of aerospace, manufacturing, national security, robotics, civil engineering and information systems.

Tull lives in Washington, D.C.

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External Advisory Board Jim V. Anderson Chief Executive Officer, SocialFlow CE 88, MS CE 89 Fred Carlson Project Development Manager Alliance Exchange FL CE 01, MBA 04 Alejandro Char Former Mayor, Baranquilla, Colombia CE 73 Raul J. Delgado Founder and CEO CESEL Engineers MS CE 68 Murray K. Griffin, P.E. Chairman Atlantic Coast Consulting, Inc. CE 79 F. Evan Haren Jr. President and CEO Haren Construction Co. Inc. CE 77 Bill Higginbotham, P.E. President and CEO ET Environmental Corporation CE 76 Michael F. Houlihan, P.E. Principal Engineer and Vice President Geosyntec Consultants CE 85, MS CE 87 Richard H. Hummel II Founder, Commodore Investments LLC Co-Founder, Federal Holdings, Inc. CE 89 Cayman James Project Manager Jacobs Engineering Group CE 99, MS EnvE 01 John M. Kelley Partner and Senior Vice President of Commercial Development North American Properties CE 92

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Silvio J. Lopez Senior Vice President Banco Popular CE 79, MS CE 81 Orlando R. Mendez, P.E. Chief Executive Officer Dorado Beach Resort CE 91, MS CE 92 Edward Metzger National Accounts Manager Trane Inc. CE 80 Emmy Montanye, P.E. Advisory Board Vice Chair Senior Vice President Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc. CE 82 Rebecca Nease Retired Branch Chief U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission CE 79 Christopher D. Pappas Special Adviser to the CEO Trinseo CE 78 Donald W. Paul Retired, Georgia Pacific CE 80 Meg Pirkle, P.E. Chief Engineer Georgia Department of Transportation MS CE 97 Jacqueline Quinn NASA-KSC Liaison NASA Kennedy Space Center CE 89 Franklin Rucker, P.E. Chief of Capital Programs, Expansion and Innovation, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority CE 79

CEEatGT External Advisory Board Members provide an important outside perspective on our programs that is essential to maintaining their relevance 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.

Ike J. Scott III President and CEO Scott Bridge Company CE 74 Wassim A. Selman, Ph.D., P.E. President, Infrastructure – North America, Arcadis CE 81, MS CE 82, Ph.D. CE 86 S. Paul Shailendra President, SG Property Services CE 01 Barbara Sloan Retired Principal, Cambridge Systematics, Inc. MS CE 77 Deborah K. Staudinger Partner, Hogan Lovells CE 78 Damian K. Taylor Senior Vice President Arch Street Capital Advisors CE 01 Knox W. Tull Jr. President, Jackson and Tull MS CE 72 Michael R. Van Epp Principal, EnvironCaptial CE 03 H. Arthur Williams President Williams Steel Erection Company, Inc. CE 83

CAP

CORPORATE AFFILIATES PROGRAM The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering would like to extend a special thank you to the members of our Corporate Affiliates Program. Over the 2019-2020 academic year, the program grew from 17 to 26 companies—a reflection of the success we’ve found through engaging our friends in the engineering industry.

The goal of the Corporate Affiliates Program is simple but powerful: to provide a link between our CEE students and industry partners through opportunities for mentorship, employment and education. The program has proven to be mutually beneficial: Companies get direct access and quality interactions with the nation’s brightest young civil and environmental engineers. Students, likewise, get facetime with recruiters and a window into the working world. Our CAP partners also provide the School with funding that allows us to keep our civil and environmental engineering programs among the nation’s best.

For more information about joining the Corporate Affiliates Program, please contact Emily Foster at Emily.foster@ce.gatech.edu.

2019-2020 Partners

LEARN MORE: CE.GATECH.EDU/CAP 53

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