MIT Course One Newsletter -- 2019 Year in Review

COURSE ONE Newsletter 2019 – Year in Review

Alumni News

Leonardo da Vinci: Master Engineer Rising Stars Page 10 MIT CEE Hosts Workshop for Early-Career Women in Academia

The Future of CEE Education Page 12 Preparing the next generation of engineers

Faculty Research Page 18

Karly Bast ’19 MEng with her scale model of the Renaissance genius’s bridge

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COURSE ONE Newsletter

2019 – Year in Review

Department Head and Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering Markus Buehler, PhD Administrative Officer Jarina Shrestha Writer and Editor Maria Iacobo MS Design Ink Design, Inc. Contact us at: one@mit.edu

Front cover: Karly Bast ’19 MEng Cover photo: Gretchen Ertl 2

Table of Contents

Letter from Markus

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CEE News and Events

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• Research Speed Dating

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• MIT CEE Hosts Workshop for Early-Career Women in Academia

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• Forum Addresses Future of Civil and Environmental Engineering Education

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• Advancing Engineering by Way of Ancient Rome

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• TREX 2019

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Research Highlights

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Faculty News

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Faculty Roundtable

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Alumni News • Engineers Put Leonardo da Vinci’s Bridge Design to the Test

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• Alumni Profiles Michael Zeppieri ’04 SM MBA

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Alejandra Ortiz ’15 PhD

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Zara L’Heureux ’13

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Daniel Zarrilli ’99 SM

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Alumni Panel and New Research Dinner

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Looking Ahead: 2020

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A Note From Markus

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Dear CEE Alumni and Friends: I am delighted to share with you the latest edition of our newsletter, Course One. I encourage you to browse this newsletter to learn about recent happenings in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering over the past few months, and specifically updates from the work our students, postdocs, research staff and faculty are leading.

It has been a busy year filled with impressive research and accomplishments. We continue to spread our research outside of the lab and classroom through our emphasis on hands-on fieldwork experiences and establishing connections with institutions both here at home and beyond. Through the support of our alumni and friends of the department, we were able to open a new MEng maker space and a new student lounge in honor of the late Professor Joe Sussman.

We have also hired several new faculty: Professors Cathy Wu (transportation), Josephine Carstensen (structures), and Desiree Plata (environmental chemistry). We welcome them warmly to the CEE family and look forward to their contributions to education, mentorship, research and the evolution of our discipline. Learn more about their vision in the faculty roundtable featured in the newsletter.

I would like to call your attention to just a few of our highlights. Every other year we host early-career women who have already distinguished themselves professionally and are considering careers in academia. Led by Professor Colette Heald, this October we held our 3rd CEE Rising Stars Workshop, bringing together 20 women to create networking opportunities and share advice from current faculty on building a career in academia.

Also, this fall, co-led by Professor Saurabh Amin and Assistant Professor Desiree Plata, the department hosted thought leaders and educators from universities across the country to discuss how best to prepare a new generation of civil and environmental engineers. We believe that CEE offers tremendous career opportunities for students who want to address climate change, energy consumption and sustainability at scale. We thank all of you who have participated in our new internship program for CEE undergraduates, or the various engagement events we hosted over the

year to bring alumni back to campus to network with our students. There is nothing better for our students than seeing your successes and their impact.

Field research is central to Civil and Environmental Engineering. Our department has dozens of opportunities for all students – first-year students through doctoral students to postdoctoral training – to learn in the field. Two of our programs are profiled: Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences (TREX) where more than a dozen students spend two weeks in Hawaii over IAP to gain hands-on fieldwork and research experiences as well as exposure to analyzing data, interpreting results and presenting research to various audiences; and, Materials in Art, Archeology and Architecture (ONE-MA3) where rising sophomores spend three weeks in Italy researching ancient artifacts and structural materials which inspires their educational projects in the fall term. And, learn about Karly Bast ’19 MEng, who conducted breakthrough research with her scale model of da Vinci’s bridge design.

This edition of the newsletter also includes alumni profiles. We are tremendously excited to learn where their MIT education has taken them. We hope to hear from you as well. And, if you are in the area for business or travel, we hope you will visit! I look forward to welcoming you (back) to MIT. I thank you all for your continued support of MIT and the department.

In closing, I wish you and your loved ones the very best for 2020 and hope to see you at one of the departmental events in the new year.

Sincerely,

Markus J. Buehler Department Head, MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering McAfee Professor of Engineering

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CEE News and Events

New student lounge (1-143) CEE has a newly renovated student lounge! Opened in honor of the late Professor Joseph Sussman who passed away in 2018, the space was created for collaboration, relaxation and community-building events. A generous gift from Michael ’80 SM and Jenny Messner, in memory of Professor Sussman, enabled CEE to design a lounge that fits the many needs of the CEE community: a private study/meeting room; flat screen television monitors equipped for interactive learning and collaboration; a new kitchen with a coffee maker and refrigerator; couches, tables and chairs; a projector system and retractable writeable wall.

MEng Maker Space (1-141) This new space is conceived to complement the traditional “chalk and talk” lectures and foster project-based and student-driven learning and teamwork – the interdisciplinary work that occurs in research and industrial practice. “Here, students studying at the intersection of engineering, computation and architecture, learn together through group discussion, presentations, coursework, class projects, and structural model making, with an aim to combine concepts in research and practical design of structures,” says Gordana Herning, an MEng lecturer who was part of the team to conceive of the new space. They also interact with leading designers from the professional practice, who present guest lectures, review students’ class projects and provide feedback, as well as discuss design-based research topics.

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Desktop stations, moveable furniture, the AV projection system, dry-erase panel and display bookcases provide flexibility to configure the space for the ongoing activities – from public and dynamic discussion to quiet reflection and study. Table arrangements can be easily changed to transform the space setting from that of a class presentation to a comfortable team-based conversation. Bookcases can display texts that inspire design exploration and pictures of students’ favorite structural masterpieces or their group gatherings, allowing students to personalize the room in ways that enhance the joy of being there, learning and collaborating. The space is also beautifully located, having views of Masseh Hall and Charles River through tall windows that provide abundant natural light.

2nd Young Alumni Panel The 2nd annual Young Alumni Panel, held in September, gave students an opportunity to hear from recent CEE graduates on their paths from MIT to budding careers. This year’s panel offered a variety of examples where CEE alumni are working. Left to right: Siyi Zhang ’16, associate project manager at Tesla; Emily Shorin ’16, senior research analyst at The Brattle Group; David Wu ’19, data scientist at UPS; Brenda Stern ’17, MEng ’18, structural engineer at Thornton Tomasetti; and, Zara L’Heureux ’13, a fellow at the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E).

Read more about Zara on page 32.

Say “Cheese!”

Students took a study break at the end of the Spring semester to enjoy homemade grilled cheese sandwiches prepared and served by CEE faculty.

Stephanie Chin ’19, Amber VanHemel ’19; Meghan Reisenauer ’19; David Wu ’19; Janille Maragh ’13, doctoral candidate.

Faculty came prepared to cook and serve students: Professors Admir Masic, Heidi Nepf and Tal Cohen.

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CEE News and Events

Commencement 2019 CEE undergraduate and graduate students celebrate with family and friends following the commencement ceremony in Killian Court.

PhD Graduates!

Hooded CEE PhD graduates toss their caps to celebrate their newly acquired doctoral degrees.

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Research Speed Dating Showcasing multidisciplinary opportunities and fostering collaboration

The range of research underway in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is extraordinary. A forum to share this work and the talented engineers behind it is the annual Research Speed Dating event, now in its eighth year.

• Assistant Professor Tami Lieberman highlighted her research investigating how to add a microbe to an already established microbiome. Lieberman’s research is conducted through the lens of evolution using DNA sequencing to identify how bacteria spreads between people and how it evolves within humans as they coexist with other adapted mutations.

• Josh Moss, a doctoral candidate, works in Professor Jesse Kroll’s lab which studies atmospheric chemistry. Moss shared his research which is focused on aspects of urban pollution such as how smog forms, the reactions of certain chemicals in the atmosphere and secondary organic aerosol.

• Gilbert W. Winslow Assistant Professor Cathy Wu, who officially began her position with the department in June, discussed her research which is centered around the

• Graduate student Andrew Feldman, who received the best Lightning Talk award, presented his research on water exchange patterns in the soil-plant continuum using a NASA-developed environmental monitoring satellite.

Feldman works with Bacardi Stockholm Water Foundations Professor Dara Entekhabi’s lab to study soil moisture and vegetation water content observations to evaluate plant water storage changes following rainfall.

A digital poster presentation, which encouraged networking and collaboration among researchers, allowed the audience to peruse the work and speak with the researchers. More than 20 students and postdocs presented digital posters.

Postdoc Fabiola Sanchez won honorable mention for her work on the dynamics of the active-growing bacterial community in the estuarine environment during a 24-hour period. Her poster explained the active community is different from the total and its abundance exhibits a strong correlation with the chlorophyll levels and the day-night cycle.

CEE News and Events

A broad display of research – human microbiomes, carbon partitioning of plants, climate change, urban pollution, recovering from major storm damage, algorithms for carsharing networks, integrating autonomy into transportation systems and more – was conveyed in brief sessions by a mix of faculty, research scientists, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates at the February event. The event was established to provide inspiration and a new perspective that could fuel new ideas for participants and audience members.

Among the presentations:

integration of autonomy into transportation systems. Wu said that researchers do not have a strong understanding of the potential impact autonomous vehicles could have on society.

Stephanie Chin ’19 presented a poster analyzing noisy data with limited training data, based on an approach by CNN, for the specific application of a traffic surveillance camera.

This approach could help adapt general-purpose models for domain-specific content and applications such as traffic surveillance images, according to Chin.

Doctoral student Isabelle Su’s winning poster, “Exploring a Spider Web’s Structure with Sound,” explained the use of sonification in order to visualize complex 3-D spider web data through sound. Su’s interactive sonification model can be used as a versatile data exploration tool that could find spider web patterns as a creative platform or recreated for similar data networks.

The evening concluded with dinner allowing for further networking opportunities.

“Research speed dating gives our community an opportunity to present their research and collaborative opportunities to their colleagues,” said McAfee Professor of Engineering and department head Markus Buehler. “The event highlighted the inspiring research that intends to solve the imperative largescale societal issues of today, where science and engineering play a crucial role.”

Photo: Gretchen Ertl

By Taylor DeLeon 9

MIT CEE Hosts Workshop for Early-Career Women in Academia Women in STEM can find it more challenging to navigate an academic career path simply because it has not been well travelled to date. MIT is working to change this with a welldesigned map.

CEE News and Events

In October, MIT CEE hosted its third Civil and Environmental Engineering Rising Stars Workshop, bringing together 20 distinguished early-career women interested in careers in academia. The workshop included research presentations, an hour-long mentoring discussion with MIT Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart, four panel discussions on building an academic career, and lots of networking opportunities.

This year’s 20 participants came from around the globe, selected from an applicant pool of 73 women by a steering committee of MIT faculty, led by Colette Heald, professor of CEE. “Women are under-represented in the STEM faculty ranks,” said Heald, “and the late graduate student, early postdoc time is critical to deciding on future career directions. We hope that the workshop will help demystify the process of applying for faculty positions and becoming a successful faculty member.” Other members of the Steering Committee included Institute Professor and Professor of CEE Penny Chisholm; Heidi Nepf, MacVicar Faculty Fellow and Professor of CEE; Tal Cohen, Professor of CEE; Franz JosefUlm, Professor of CEE; and Bori Stoyanova, CEE’s Human Resource Administrator.

Dean of the MIT School of Engineering Anantha Chandrakasan opened the workshop sharing the history of the Rising Stars event and noting that five of the current department heads in the School of Engineering are women.

Research presented by the participants at this year’s CEE workshop involved transportation systems, drinking water vulnerability, the impact of climate change on agriculture, emissions control strategies, energy, and more.

Advice, Insight on Building Academic Careers MIT Chancellor and CEE Ford Professor of Engineering Cynthia Barnhart sat down with the workshop group to discuss her own career and answer questions. She described how the challenges she faced became more complicated over time, moving beyond the design of algorithms to issues involving public policy. When asked whether she’d ever had doubts along the way, Barnhart said: “Every time I’ve taken a new job, I’ve accepted wondering ‘Can I be successful at this job?’ And that seems right to me— if you have no doubts, you probably aren’t realizing your potential.”

The four workshop panels, made up of MIT faculty members, covered the job search and interview process, successfully navigating the first few years of a faculty career, work-life balance, and specific challenges facing women in academia.

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Workshop Chair Colette Heald listens to discussion during workshop session.

Photo: Maria Iacobo

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Twenty women from around the world were selected to participate in MIT CEE’s workshop to bring together the next generation of leaders in CEE and help prepare them for a career in academia. Photo: Maria Iacobo

McAfee Professor of Engineering and CEE department head Markus Buehler kicked off the first panel, which included Professors Nepf, Dave Des Marais, and Ali Jadbabaie, by explaining in detail the components of MIT’s hiring process.

He described what a strong application should look like, what a strong recommendation letter should include, what could be expected during interviews, and more. Nepf sat down with participants and described the key interview questions they should expect (including, “What’s your most significant result? What will you do when you come here?”) and offered insights about how to approach answering them.

“We need to acknowledge the implicit bias and structural barriers that impact women in academia,” said panelist Caitlin Mueller. Nepf raised two additional challenges: “women are socialized never to ask for anything for ourselves. Get over that, and ask for what you need” and suggested that “automatically saying yes to everything you’re asked is a big mistake. Take time to think about it and get comfortable saying no.” A CEE Rising Stars attendee in 2015, Cohen addressed the imposter syndrome many women faculty experience: “At the beginning of your career, you may not feel like a professor. It’s a transition that will take time.”

Daniella Saetta, a Ph.D candidate in environmental engineering in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University, described the job search/interview panel as “the most valuable one for me because that’s where I am right now, applying for jobs. The description of the MIT hiring process was really good. A lot of the time, we don’t get specifics about one school’s process. Even if I’m not going to be applying to MIT, having a specific process that I can then compare to others is really useful.”

Networking to Create a Cohort of Rising Stars

The second panel explored the tenure process. Panelist Franz Joself-Ulm described the process as “scary and stressful,” and emphasized the importance of seeking faculty mentors who could “help you frame the narrative you need to have for tenure.” Much of this second panel, and the group discussion after, centered on time management, how to prioritize multiple obligations around teaching, research, personal, and family life. “You have to set up and follow strict rules to maintain work-life balance,” explained Heald. “For example, I don’t answer emails after 8 pm, which helps me sleep better.” During the third panel, on work-life balance, Professor Jesse Kroll told the group: “I’m better at my job when I’m happy and doing the outside activities I enjoy.”

Addressing Specific Challenges Women Face The workshop’s final panel explored specific issues facing women. Heald said, “one big challenge women face is the lack of [female] mentors. There just aren’t that many models for you to follow.” Heald pushed back against this particular challenge by creating a support network of other women in her field to share insights and support.

The workshop was filled with opportunities for the 20 women to network over coffee breaks, lunches, campus tour, dinner with MIT faculty, and more. As Heald explains, creating a cohort of women to become the next generation of academic leaders is a key workshop goal: “The under-representation of women in academia can make it challenging for women to identify successful models and mentors with similar career experiences. For that reason, a network of peers can be particularly helpful. That’s a big part of CEE Rising Stars.”

Dr. Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, who attended the workshop in 2015 and is currently a postdoc at ETH-Zurich, said her “most valuable experience was meeting like-minded women interested in careers in academia and uncertain about how to achieve that. I met exceptionally intelligent, talented, and ambitious women from many different fields of engineering who had similar concerns about insecurities, children, family, jobs, mobility, and more. I was inspired and encouraged to know that I wasn’t alone.”

Nicole Jackson, Ph. D candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who attended this year, shared a similar experience: “It’s been really valuable to meet with my peers. CEE is incredibly diverse and the breadth of technical content that’s been covered here has been really impressive.

Meeting women who are leading some of these fields that are very different from my own has been a really wonderful experience. We need more events like this.”

By Chuck Leddy 11

Forum Addresses Future of Civil and Environmental Engineering Education Academic leaders cite urgent need to expand, enhance curriculum to address societal challenges

CEE News and Events 12

Battling climate change and adapting communities to be ready for its effects on the world. Ensuring food and water security for an exploding population. Navigating ever more congested urban landscapes.

These global concerns and others have been outlined by the National Academies and other institutions as imminent threats. One discipline in particular—Civil and Environmental Engineering—has the history and capability to address these challenges on a large scale.

MIT CEE took one of the first steps to address the question on how best to prepare a new generation of civil and environmental engineers by organizing a recent one-day workshop, entitled “CEE Education Frontiers Forum,” with invited leaders and educators from 10 leading US institutions, including Stanford, Berkeley, Georgia Tech, and UT Austin.

“The discipline of CEE is really at the cusp of a lot of things,” said Saurabh Amin, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Officer of CEE at MIT and one of the organizers of the event.

“This exceptional group of universities is already addressing today’s challenges, but the field is changing so quickly that our educational efforts need to stay ahead of what we see CEE in need of.”

Forum participants engage in a discussion: Donald Webster, Karen and John Huff Chair of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Tech; David V. Rosowsky, Professor Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Vermont; Julie Zimmerman, Sr. Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University; Robert Gilbert, Chair of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Cockrell Family Chair of Departmental Leadership #3 at University of Texas, Austin. Photo: Maria Iacobo

During her plenary talk, Anette (Peko) Hosoi, Associate Dean of Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, said that it’s not uncommon for engineering curriculum to change over time. Each time the curriculum was revised, it was informed by the needs and constraints of that specific period of time which drove the educational goals forward.

Hosoi shared a historical survey of MIT engineering education which showed an overhauled curriculum approximately every 25 years to adjust to the needs of the day. From learning to design iron bridges in 1875 to electrifying the countryside in 1925, “the curriculum was turning over at a fairly rapid timescale,” she said.

“A lot of students come in wanting to change the world,” said Markus J. Buehler, Department Head of MIT CEE and Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering, and a forum coorganizer. “They want to address climate change, they want to address transportation, they want to address pollution.

CEE offers a clear pathway through today’s curriculum to make contributions in these fields, and the workshop fostered discussion into how we can further strengthen our program and provide our students even better skills for their careers after graduation.”

The workshop consisted of two plenary talks, four panel discussions, and a lunch session, all focused on how to make sure CEE students understand and are well-prepared for their post-graduate opportunities now and into the future.

Two subjects addressed throughout the day were the value of an interdisciplinary education and an increased need for excellent interpersonal skills to prepare students for the real world.

As the need for a sustainable future becomes urgent, the required skillset of CEE graduates has also broadened. These skills include foundational knowledge in emerging fields such as computing and machine learning as well as social responsibility and ethics, and leadership. For example, a welltrained civil or environmental engineer should be able to help design new solutions to make a city capable of withstanding rising sea levels associated with a changed climate, or create sustainable food, water and energy supply chains. In an increasingly digitized world, speakers pointed out that CEE students should be able to incorporate key concepts such as data analytics and applications of artificial intelligence into their solutions.

“Civil and environmental engineers are defined by our applications…not our tools,” said Mark Stacey, Department

Professor Saurabh Amin, one of the forum’s organizers, in the classroom.

Chair of CEE at University of California Berkeley, during the panel on CEE Domains and Interdisciplinary Frontiers. “We bring tools from wherever they emerge.”

MIT’s CEE education is built around three central tenants: rigorous core knowledge of the science behind the discipline, fieldwork that allows students to gain insights into real world problems, and labs designed to have students synthesize the knowledge and skills they have developed over their other coursework.

“Our curriculum is agile and designed to be adaptive to the needs of students and help them address these grand challenges,” says Amin. “The hope is that as new problems and areas of study arise, our students will be able to tackle whatever area they are interested in. We help students to tailor their coursework based on their individual goals and aspirations. This workshop identified some of the hurdles that may be coming and will help us in preparing for them.”

Nearly all in attendance agreed that the first year of a CEE curriculum was critical to demonstrate to students the possibilities of a future in the profession. One suggestion involved adding experience-based lab work during the first semester to engage students with the field from the get-go.

A similar educational reform is already underway at MIT through the Designing the First Year Experience initiative, headed by Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education Ian Waitz. Waitz acknowledged the difficulty in changing a curriculum that has been in place for decades, but recognized the importance of addressing the educational and social needs of a changing student body.

change for first year students. The goal is to bring these students into the discussions of grand challenges early on and equip them to make informed choices during their stay at MIT, and beyond.

A number of speakers also mentioned throughout the day that civil and environmental engineers are frequently at the center of civic problem solving. They must be able to engage with the public, government officials, and engineers and scientists of other backgrounds. Any new curriculum should foster the ability to connect with people of different backgrounds to strengthen leadership skills. Panels on post-grad research opportunities by representatives from the National Science Foundation, enforced this point.

Participants agreed the workshop was successful in moving the CEE education conversation forward.

“What we tried to do was…answer questions about what the CEE degree of the future would be,” says Desiree Plata, Assistant Professor in CEE at MIT and an event co-organizer. “[We] saw a lot of different opinions about that today, so that’s great for idea generation. I think there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of how to do it.”

The organizers plan to release a document summarizing the key points from the workshop to act as a jumping-off point for the next round of talks, and will seek further input from students and alumni.

“The next conversation should not start from scratch,” says Amin. “People will have their own hurdles at their own universities, but we believe that now is right time to lead this change.”

“It’s not rocket science,” said Waitz during his talk. “It’s harder than that—it’s people science.”

For example, starting this year MIT CEE began offering new discovery subjects focusing on sustainable cities and climate

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Advancing Engineering

by Way of Ancient Rome Summer fieldwork examines the intersection of modern engineering and cultural heritage

CEE News and Events Ancient Roman structures withstand millennia of wear, seismic and environmental elements, supporting generations who lived among them. Hidden within their mortar and indicated by delicate cracks and chips, the structures record something MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering students are investigating: what ancient engineering can teach them about modern materials.

Last summer, 16 rising sophomores visited civilizationspanning structures across Italy through the department’s Materials in Art, Archeology and Architecture (ONE-MA3) program. Admir Masic, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, leads the three-week fieldwork sojourn during which students conduct research on ancient artifacts and structural materials. This investigation in turn, inspires new research projects the students explore in Masic’s 1.057 Heritage Science and Technology class which they take in the fall.

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“Bringing students into the field is the easiest way to stimulate their curiosity and exposes them to the sophisticated engineering feats of the ancient world,” says Masic, who has led this trip for four years.

In his research, Masic and his team apply principles of chemistry and materials science to characterize and organize human-made materials in use in the past and present.

Several ancient materials, such as Egyptian blue pigment, gypsum, and Roman concrete, serve as the foundation for the subject.

Conventional, deterioration prone, modern concrete is usually composed of three materials: water, rock, and cement. That formula is deceptively simple. The specific compositions of those materials can make or break the resulting structure.

In the case of Roman concrete, those specific compositions are not well understood and only archived in the structures themselves.

“Understanding the reasons behind the resilience of Roman concrete could pave new paths,” says Janille Maragh ’13, a CEE PhD candidate and teaching assistant. “It’s one thing to do research using cultural heritage data, but without context it’s difficult to grasp the magnitude of the problem.”

Markus Buehler, McAfee Professor of Engineering and CEE department head, considers this summer program a quintessential MIT experience — by studying ancient

construction materials in the field, students are able to connect theoretical concepts to practical settings and can begin to tackle modern issues in construction.

“ONE-MA3 offers students a hands-on experience to learn how materials are the backbone of infrastructure, and how the field has evolved over thousands of years,” says Buhler.

Reflecting the Institute’s motto, “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”), Masic led students on a series of experiences to various historical and archeological sites around Italy giving them an opportunity to interact with different materials, examine their uses first-hand, and contemplate the cultural significance of ancient structures and the materials that built them. Through lectures and field exercises, students studied the chemical makeup, structural design, historical significance and conservation methods of preserved structures.

For example, at their visit to a 13th century castle in Sermoneta, students learned about the significance of lime, a key ingredient in Roman concrete. In an exercise designed to elicit creative methods to engineer new materials and technologies, the students tried to compose Roman concrete

using different aggregates such as volcanic ash, ground clay bricks and pumice – materials that were present in ancient Rome. Through experimentation with different materials, proportions, and compression testing of the resulting samples and structures, students learned the challenges behind creating mortars that are durable and sustainable in the modern world.

Other historic and architecturally significant sites on the trip included the Vatican Museum in Rome, the ancient city of Pompeii, and the Egyptian Museum in Turin.

Anna Landler ‘22, says the program helped her grasp concepts crucial to civil and environmental engineering that would take months to understand in the classroom.

“Being out in the field, where we were able to see and feel these objects, helps me understand them better and know how they interact with the world around us … I wouldn’t be nearly as inspired as I would be if it was in a lecture format or a textbook.”

Story and photos by Taylor DeLeon

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TREX 2019 Fieldwork: one of the essentials to train environmental engineers, scientists

CEE News and Events

Traveling Research Environmental Experiences (TREX) provides undergraduates the opportunity to gain hands-on fieldwork and research experience as well as exposure to analyzing data, interpreting results and presenting research to various audiences. The three-credit field course is offered during the Institute’s three-week Independent Activities Period in January.

“This is an exciting opportunity for our students to go out into the field, build equipment, set up a real-world experimental campaign, and take the data back to MIT to dig deep into the analysis and formulate engineering solutions,” says Professor Markus Buehler, CEE department head.

The program’s 2019 trip, to Hawaii’s Big Island, focused on meteorology, atmospheric composition and forest recovery following the 2018 eruption of Kilauea, which ceased in mid2018.

Professor Jesse Kroll led students on a research project to characterize background emissions of sulfate particles, a key pollutant in Hawaii’s famous Volcanic Smog, or “Vog.”

Professor David Des Marais leads students as they measure plants along a line transect.

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Past TREX classes had measured vog during the continuous eruption of Kilauea, but had never been able to compare these values to levels in the absence of volcanic emissions.

Walter Henry Gale (1929) Career Development Professor David Des Marais led the 2019 class on a project to understand the impact of the 2018 eruptions on forest health.

Students made measurements of forest canopy structure and the health of individual plants in natural stands of Ohi’a trees.

“TREX is meant to round out the three essentials of training scientists and engineers — work in the classroom, laboratory, and field,” says Des Marais. “The real key is that students learn the basics of field research. For many students, this is the only exposure they get to collecting data and learning in the field.”

Following two weeks in the field, students presented their research to a local high school. They prepared a slide presentation and demonstrated working with a drone; the latter was a big hit with the students.

Caio Guilherme-Pereira, a post-doctoral fellow, teaches Emma Rutkowski ’19 the basics of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) control.

TREX students use UAVs to measure the reflectance off of tree canopies as a measure of forest health.

The 2019 class built small weather stations and deployed them around the windward side of Hawaii as part of ongoing research on atmospheric chemistry. Here, Stephen Duncan ’20 tests out the limits of weather detection with a handheld weather observatory in the strong wind near the summit of Mauna Kea.

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Faculty Research

Research Highlights

Donald and Martha Harleman Professor Heidi Nepf and PhD student Jiarui Lei published research in the Journal of Fluids and Structures titled “Blade dynamics in combined waves and current” and in Coastal Engineering, titled “Wave damping by flexible vegetation,” that demonstrates seagrass’ strong potential for curbing erosion. By dissipating wave energy, the plants could help protect vulnerable shorelines in the face of rising sea levels. Through experiments and mathematical modeling, the researchers were able to quantify how large and dense seagrass meadows must be in order to provide sufficient damping of waves in a given geographic, climate, and oceanographic setting. The abundant seagrass could help prevent beach erosion, protect seawalls, improve water quality, and absorb carbon.

Professor Elfatih Eltahir

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Research from Breene M. Kerr Professor Elfatih Eltahir shows China’s most populous and agriculturally important region could face deadly heat waves unless significant measures are taken at the global scale to limit greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change.

The findings were published in Nature Communications.

Assistant Professor Lydia Bourouiba and graduate student Stephanie Poulain published a new study in the Physical Review Letters that shows how contaminated bubbles act as tiny microbial grenades, launching microorganisms and potential pathogens into the air.

Assistant Professor Lydia Bourouiba’s research on fundamental fluid dynamics was chosen to be highlighted in the Spotlight Video for the School of Engineering’s December 2018 Newsletter. Professor Bourouiba’s findings could elucidate how a range of diseases spread.

Professor Jesse Kroll

Professor Eric Alm responded to an MIT News 3Q. Alm studies the human microbiome in various populations and investigates the differences in microbial diversity among each community.

Alm found there is greater diversity in populations with “traditional” nonindustrialized lifestyles as opposed to North Americans, who are exposed to antibiotics and processed foods.

Professor Alm and School of Engineering colleague, Professor Peter Dedon, received a 2019 Transformative Research Award from the National Institutes of Health allowing them to collaborate on a project over the next five years. Alm is a professor of biological engineering and of civil and environmental engineering, the director of MIT’s Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has developed many of the standard tools and algorithms used to identify bacteria in the human microbiome. Read more on MIT News.

Professor Colette Heald

The results of real-time air quality research efforts in Hawaii during the Kilauea volcanic eruption in May 2018 by Professor Jesse Kroll and Professor Colette Heald were made public. Kroll and researchers deployed low-cost sensors around affected zones in order to gain insight into the particles and toxic gas (known as vog) emitted into the atmosphere.

Professor Moshe Ben-Akiva and co-authors Daniel McFadden and Kenneth Train, published “Foundations of Stated Preference Elicitation: Consumer Behavior and Choice-based Conjoint Analysis” in Foundations and Trends Econometrics.

It provides preference data collection methods, discrete choice models, and statistical analysis tools that can be used to forecast demand and assess welfare impacts for new or modified products or services in real markets, and summarize the conditions under which the reliability of these methods has been demonstrated or can be tested.

Associate Professor Xuanhe Zhao

Professor Ruben Juanes and a team of researchers at MIT and Princeton, including former graduate student Amir Pahlavan PhD ’18, discovered a way to make gas bubbles develop with precise size, as a result of universality of bubble pinch-off in confined geometries. The findings, published in PNAS, could impact the development of microfluidic devices for biomedical research and aid in understanding the way carbon dioxide is trapped in underground rock formations to help mitigate climate change.

Associate Professor Xuanhe Zhao and researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering developed a robotic thread that could deliver clot-reducing therapies in response to stroke or other brain blockages.

The thread is magnetically controlled and can be paired with existing technology in order to guide the robot through patient blood vessels to treat blockages and lesions urgently.

Treating stroke patients within the first 90 minutes may drastically increase survival rates, says Zhao. Read more on MIT News.

Professor Martin Polz published a new research paper in Cell, titled “A reverse ecology approach based on a biological definition of microbial populations.” The researchers developed a new method that allows for the identification of ecologically and medically relevant microbial population structure that can help pinpoint the genetic factors associated with environmental factors as well as human diseases. Read more on MIT News.

Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Assistant Professor Admir Masic, graduate student Janille Maragh and colleagues published a research paper, “The Temple Scroll: Reconstructing an Ancient Manufacturing Practice,” in Science Advances. The Temple Scroll, one of the longest (nearly 25 feet), whitest and best-preserved of all the texts from the Dead Sea scrolls collection, is significant due to the layered structure of its parchment, which includes a collagenous base material and an atypical inorganic overlayer. The researchers used advanced material characterization tools to analyze the chemistry of the materials. They found that evaporitic sulfate salts were used, indicative of a unique ancient production technology.

Their findings could provide insight into how to preserve invaluable historical documents. Read more on MIT News.

Department Head Markus Buehler

Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor of Engineering and Department Head Markus Buehler, graduate student Isabelle Su, research scientist Dr. Zhao Qin and collaborators developed an innovative experimental method that captures the sophisticated architecture of three-dimensional spider webs. Their image analysis and 3D Assistant Professor Admir Masic

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models of the web, demonstrated for the Cyrtophora citricola spider in their study, can help with the understanding of the structure and behavior of 3D webs, and enable the design of innovative web-inspired structures.

Research Highlights

Professor Markus Buehler and Dr. Zhao Qin create music by overlaying vibrations of protein structures.

The protein synthesizer can be used for educational purposes, allowing participants to create their own sound combinations. It exemplifies how a complex harmony can be reduced to a simple melody and basic notes. Similar to science, any material can be broken down to just a grain and then again to individual atoms. This analogy provides a unique way to communicate science through music.

Professor Markus Buehler, research scientist Francisco MartínMartínez, and research affiliate Jingjie Yeo from the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM) published a paper in Nature Communications on paraffin-enabled graphene transfer. The findings open the doors to high-performance electronics based on large-area twodimensional materials.

Professor Markus Buehler, former postdoc Anna Tarakanova and Claire Hsu ’20 published a paper in Science Advances about the use of spider silk for robotics muscles. The spider silk’s robustness and ability to contract and twist above a certain level of relative humidity in the air could assist in the creation of artificial muscles for soft robotics or smart fabrics.

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Associate Professor Otto Cordero

Associate Professor Otto Cordero and researchers published research on the discovery of simple assembly rules for marine microbiomes, showing that species can be grouped into two functional modules. The guidelines can help researchers understand the diversity of microbes in the environment, predict community composition, and rationally design ecological systems in the lab.

Professor Otto Cordero studies ways to make the Galapagos marine iguana more resilient to climate change. In the Galapagos archipelago, changes in the ocean water temperature can lead to the invasion of fast-growing algae. When this occurs, populations of specialized herbivores such as the Galapagos marine iguana decline due to their inability to digest the invasive algae. Cordero and a team of researchers hypothesize this is caused by a loss of functional diversity in the gut microbiome of the animals. The group is now studying the enzymes and microbes that breakdown the algae the iguanas eat, and are hoping to design microbiome intervention that could allow the iguanas to expand their diet, enabling them to survive extreme climate events. Read more on MIT News.

Professor Cordero and postdoctoral associates Eli Ebrahimi and Julia Schwartzman published new research in PNAS showing that in order to degrade, recalcitrant polysaccharides bacteria “team up” by forming micrometer scales cell clusters where cells cooperate. This work, achieved by using a combination of computational models and experiments, shows that emergence of these cooperative clusters is a stochastic process that depends on cells encountering each other and aggregating on the surface of polysaccharide particles. This implies that degradation requires a critical cell density of bacteria, or otherwise it may never happen or take extremely long.

Ebrahimi, Schwartzman and Cordero showed that for some organisms those critical cell densities can be larger than their natural abundance in the environment, suggesting that the degradation of complex organic matter can be in some cases bacteria-limited.

Faculty News

Professor Penny Chisholm

Institute Professor Penny Chisholm gave a TEDTalk on Prochlorococcus, “the tiny creature that secretly powers the planet.”

Professor Charlie Harvey and Donald and Martha Harleman Professor Heidi Nepf were elected as 2018 AGU Fellows. Awarded to only 1% of members a year, AGU Fellows are AGU members whose “visionary leadership and scientific excellence have fundamentally advanced research in their respective fields.”

Assistant Professor Benedetto Marelli

Assistant Professor Dave Des Marais was profiled by the Society for the Study of Evolution and discussed his research which is focused on how the physical environment impacts the evolution and ecology of natural plant populations.

Paul M Cook Career Development Assistant Professor Benedetto Marelli received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The award is the highest honor given by the US Government to emerging engineers and scientists who show exceptional potential to be leaders in science and technology.

Faculty News

Professor Oral Buyukozturk delivered the plenary lecture, “Roadmap for Sustainable Built Environment: a science-based multidisciplinary research,” at the 2019 Gulf Conference in Kuwait. The conference was the result of the successful completion of the first MIT - Kuwait multidisciplinary signature project; Buyukozturk was the principal investigator. The group held three international workshops on sustainable materials, energy and infrastructure sensing and monitoring. The conference also featured MIT Associate Provost Professor Richard K. Lester.

Professor Andrew Whittle was recently named a Tsinghua Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Whittle was honored for his “distinguished achievements and his long partnership with the School.” He received the professorship in a ceremony at the university where he also led a keynote presentation, “Building a Better Mousetrap: The Continuing Quest for More Reliable Models of Soil Behavior.”

Professor Oral Buyukozturk

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Faculty News

Gilbert W. Winslow Assistant Professor Cathy Wu’s PhD work on autonomous vehicles was featured in Wired.

The article reviews how researchers now use simulation techniques to provide more realistic, accurate and useful visualizations of traffic flow. Wu was a PhD candidate working at Berkeley’s Institute for Transportation Studies at the time and conducted research on the ways in which autonomous vehicles could positively impact traffic flow. The researchers found if there are five to 10 percent of autonomous vehicles on the road, it can help alleviate localized congestion which would in turn lessen traffic on a larger scale.

Read more here.

Professor Emeritus Eduardo Kausel’s book titled “Advanced Structural Dynamics” published in 2007 (2017) was judged best structural dynamics books of all time by Book Authority. The list includes 43 books on the topic and is tied for third place. The book earned a five-star review on Amazon. Read more here.

Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor of Engineering and Department Head, Markus Buehler and his lab, Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics, were highlighted in the article “How AI and 3D Printing are Revolutionizing Materials Design,” by R&D World magazine.

Professor Buehler and graduate student Isabelle Su collaborated with MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology to create an interactive spider web instrument used in a performance in Paris. Faculty Director and Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor in MIT’s Department of Music and Theater Arts Evan Ziporyn was a key contributor to the design of the instrument and concert execution.

Professor Buehler was awarded the “highly cited author” certificate by the Royal Society of Chemistry of Journals in 2019. Buehler was one of the top 5% of authors highly cited, for his research paper titled, “Polydopamine and eumelanin molecular structures investigated with ab initio calculations.”

Read more here.

The Scientist featured Associate Professor Otto Cordero in an article highlighting his background and research history.

Cordero started his lab at MIT in 2015 and studies the community ecology of microbes in their natural ecological contexts. Read more here.

Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor Desirée Plata and graduate student Nina Janković’s research is featured on September 2019 cover of RSC Environmental Science: Nano. Their paper, entitled “Engineered nanomaterials in the context of global element cycles,” provides a bird’s-eye view of the status, scale, and projected development of engineered nanomaterials relative to global element mobilization rates, which may serve to guide pointed nanomaterial environmental health and safety research. Notably, their article is first to consider engineered nanomaterials within the framework of anthropogenic element cycling of bulk materials at the global level.

Read more here.

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Professor John Williams

Professor John Williams hosted a weeklong course on computational thinking for high school students in Santiago, Chile, through a collaboration between MIT Sloan Latin America Office, the everis foundation Chile, and the Municipality of Santiago. The goal of the course is to generate interest among high school students, with an emphasis on inspiring young women, encourage a new perspective on technology, and to learn and apply computational strategies that will lead to employment. The course was the idea of Dr. Abel Sanchez, who started a similar course in Mexico three years ago; the course is now taught in 21 Mexican cities.

Esther & Harold E. Edgerton Career Dev. Assistant Professor Admir Masic presented at the MIT.nano grand opening on “exploring the past for a more sustainable future.”

Professor Eltahir hosted a workshop at MIT, organized

by Lincoln Laboratory and CEE, to examine national security repercussions of climate change. The workshop was attended by MIT researchers and policy experts, the U.S. Geological Survey, World Bank, and U.S. Agency for International Development.

Professor Masic’s MIT Refugee Action (ReACT) Certificate Program, which offers learning opportunities for displaced populations around the world, graduated its first cohort of students in the Computer and Data Science program.

Associate Professor Lydia Bourouiba

Associate Professor Lydia Bourouiba was interviewed for the “Live Long and Master Aging” podcast. In the episode “How Did I Get This Cold?” she discussed how colds are transmitted, vulnerability to infectious diseases, living in dense populations and the implications for the spread of disease, and the mechanics of sneezing.

Professor Bourouiba presented a TEDMED talk about how fluid dynamics and biophysics can provide insight into airborne disease transmission. Watch here.

Research by Breene M. Kerr Professor Elfatih Eltahir and colleagues is featured in a UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction article titled, “Saudi Arabia: Muslim pilgrims risk being killed by heat.” The researchers explain as climate change drives temperatures higher, the pilgrimage to Mecca will become hot enough to cause damage to the heart, brain and kidneys. The researchers stressed that substantial measures need to be taken to limit the impact of climate change. Read more here.

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New Faculty

Faculty Roundtable

Josephine V. Carstensen joined CEE as an assistant professor in September 2019, positioning the department strongly in the structural design area and complementing existing strengths in CEE and beyond.

An area critical for infrastructure resilience, this field offers numerous opportunities for cutting edge research and teaching. Carstensen’s research focuses on the development of advanced structural design methods, including generative design such as topology optimization. Her top+ad lab (topology optimization and advanced design) is an interdisciplinary engineering lab centered on developing new rigorous methods and algorithms that can improve structural design at length scales ranging from material architectures to tall buildings.

Carstensen earned her bachelor’s and master of science degrees in civil engineering at the Technical University of Denmark and her masters and PhD degrees (also in civil engineering) from Johns Hopkins University.

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Desiree Plata joined CEE as an assistant professor in July 2018. Plata’s work is in the area of environmental chemistry, with applications in minimizing the environmental impact of emerging technologies —with a particular focus on nanomaterials and the energy sector. She has made fundamental contributions to the field of heterogeneous catalysis with respect to the bond-building mechanisms in carbon nanotube synthesis, which can be leveraged to lessen environmental impacts. Her work continues to illuminate novel chemistries that occur during environmental transformation processes of organic molecules.

Cathy Wu joined the Institute

Plata is an NSF CAREER awardee, a National Academy of Engineers Frontiers of Engineering fellow, a two-time National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science fellow, and recognized for excellence

by Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. She earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Union College and her PhD in chemical oceanography and environmental chemistry from the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s joint program in oceanography in 2009.

Before coming to MIT, Plata was an assistant professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale and Associate Director for Research at the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale.

Wu earned her bachelor’s and master’s in EECS at MIT in 2012 and 2013, and PhD in EECS at UC Berkeley in 2018. Prior to joining MIT, she was a postdoc at Microsoft Research AI. She has received numerous fellowships, best dissertation, best paper and teaching awards including the 2019 IEEE ITSS Best PhD Award.

Cathy has collaborated and worked broadly across fields, including transportation, computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, urban planning, public policy, and institutions, including Microsoft Research, OpenAI, the Google X Self-Driving Car Team, AT&T, Caltrans, Facebook, and Dropbox.

She is actively building programs to unlock the potential of interdisciplinary research in computing, including as the founder and former Chair of the Interdisciplinary Research Initiative within the ACM Future of Computing Academy.

as the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor of CEE with a core affiliation in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) in July 2019. Cathy works at the intersection of machine learning, optimization, and large-scale urban systems and other societal systems.

Her recent research focuses on mixed autonomy systems in mobility, which studies the complex integration of automation such as self-driving cars into existing urban systems. She is broadly interested in developing algorithms to enable reliable decisionmaking in urban and societal systems.

Faculty Roundtable To introduce three of our newer faculty members, we sat down to discuss their career paths and why they chose to pursue their research and teaching careers at MIT

What led you to your career in civil and environmental engineering?

Josephine: I don’t know if I chose it so much as it chose me. I dreamt of doing fashion design and spent my whole childhood sewing things and drawing. I was living in Australia with my parents when I had to decide on university. I was planning to apply to a fashion school when I went to see the Sydney Opera House to let myself become inspired for a dress and found that the reinforced concrete was the most inspiring thing for me. I changed track and applied for civil engineering and stayed with it. It’s not something that has always been there, it’s just that the fire was lit and kept growing as I got more into it.

Cathy: I’m from a family of engineers, but I didn’t really know what engineering was when I was little. I was told engineers solved problems and I always interpreted it as solving societal problems for some reason. Not like designing a toaster oven or something! I liked my programming and physics classes in high school so I chose to study EECS. But the whole time I thought ‘I’m going to be an engineer so what’s the problem I’m going to solve? I’m gaining these technical skills, but what is the problem?’ There are a lot of societal problems – healthcare, food, energy, education – where it wasn’t clear to me that EECS is the right skill if I wanted to solve them. But, when I learned about self-driving cars, I saw the connection between self-driving cars, lives saved, energy saved, access to mobility. It was very clear that they could not happen without EECS skills. That really focused me and changed my direction.

That’s when I reached out to Course One [at MIT] as an undergrad and started taking transportation classes and looking into robotics. It just became very clear that this was a societal problem that these skills were suitable for.

Desiree: I started with the problem and tried to find the skills to support that. When I was a young child, I observed a lot of sickness in a high-density [area] in a nearby town and I hypothesized that it was something in the air or the water; something that everyone shared that was leading to this diseased population. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the Earth system and trying to understand chemicals in the environment and tools that you might use to uncover these mysteries, and that’s what led me down the path that I’m on.

It turns out that I was right; this town did have an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site nearby that had contaminated the drinking water, giving rise to at least some of the illnesses I was observing. By the time I got to grad school, this was one of the things I was conscientious about and I didn’t want to see that happen again. So, instead of just thinking about how we can study and track chemicals

in the environment, I really wanted to challenge myself to keep those pollutants that might be hazardous to human or ecological systems out of the environment in the first place.

This requires thinking about how we invent new technologies in a way that has environmental objectives included in the design process.

What led each of you to MIT? You could work for a company or could be leading a project…why go into academia?

Cathy: My original intent was to be an engineer in industry.

But, during the first year of grad school, I had a realization…I don’t know quite what [else] to call it. I was working on a project with AT&T and the purpose was to use some of their data to improve public transit coordination operations.

I realized that I’m neither in the private or the public entity.

I’m this third party. But, somehow, I’m working with one in order to work with the other. I found it very interesting that they couldn’t just work together. There had to be this sort of middleman. I realized academia is this impartial ground where different entities with different interests, constraints and skill sets and languages can come together because everyone is incentivized to work with a university. That’s where their future employees come from, there’s positive public relations, and so we could actually make something happen in the world that potentially couldn’t happen directly. That was the first [time] I realized that academia might be a special place where there’s a lot of societal or public good that maybe can’t happen directly in the public sector or the private sector because of mismatched values in the system. So, that actually led me to consider academia for the first time.

“ I was planning to apply to a fashion school when I went to see the Sydney Opera House to let myself become inspired for a dress and found that the reinforced concrete was the most inspiring thing for me.

I changed track and applied for civil engineering and stayed with it.”

– Professor Carstensen

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Faculty Roundtable

“ I really wanted to challenge myself to keep those pollutants that might be hazardous to human or ecological systems out of the environment in the first place. This requires thinking about how we invent new technologies in a way that has environmental objectives included in the design process.”

– Professor Plata

As Cathy highlighted, MIT students really do want to make positive impacts through their work and if we’re not teaching them how to include environmental metrics in that thought pattern, then we’re doing them a disservice. We want to say, ‘what is the best knowledge that we can apply right now to be able to look into that distant future and prevent those things from happening?’ Then we strive for positive impact on the economics and the performance of the process or the material or the design as well. That was one of the things that really motivated me to come to MIT: to change the way we, as a society, invent.

What made you want to come back to MIT? Cathy: Actually, I was really inspired by ‘MIT For A Better World.’ That campaign was already going on when I was an undergrad here. That was also very consistent with believing that engineers are supposed to solve societal problems. So, I think that [idea] grew and grew among my peers and myself while we were undergrads. And then IDSS – the mission of MIT – is also to connect technical methods with societal problems. And CEE focuses on the societal problems.

All the other places I was considering [my role] would have been a pure computer science or a pure electrical engineering position. I really felt that half of what I value and did would not count. I’d have to carefully, on my own, carve out time to work on the domain problems or on the methods problems. The position [at MIT CEE] and the environment here really supports both.

Josephine: Much of what Cathy said rings true for me as well. But, in addition there’s also a timeline that I find appealing, especially in the domain that I work in which is related to structural design and construction. Most often there’s not really economy or time to work longer than the finish of the current project that you’re working on within industry. What I like about academia is that there’s someone who can see ten years into the future and I get to play with ‘how can we do things better in the medium to long-term’ especially with the global challenges that we have today with climate change and reducing emissions. For construction and structural design, we’re going to need to build more, but how can we do that in a better way? A lot of the components that are currently being used, haven’t been redesigned or revisited since the ‘50s where we can fabricate quite a lot differently than we did back then.

Desiree: I was motivated to come to MIT to have access to the students. One of the big missions of my work is to change the way that we invent materials and processes and you can’t do that without training the people who invent materials and processes! So, we’re thinking about how we systematically inject that into an MIT education so that

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the designs and prototypes and the processes that they’re proposing are more environmentally sustainable as well as meeting their technological performance and economic objectives out in the world.

Cathy: I wanted to second Desiree’s point! I think one of the most compelling aspects [of being at MIT] is influence on the students. At the grad level, that’s clearly very good for research. At the undergrad level, making any difference in the undergraduate education of the next generation of leaders in engineering is phenomenal. To expose them to additional perspectives on environmental aspects of sustainability, that is hugely impactful and very, very exciting. It’s a huge draw.

Do you think that MIT has these young minds looking in that direction or do you think they come here already wanting to make an impact in the world?

Cathy: Anecdotally, there was a concentration of students in my undergraduate dorm here that were very down-to-earth, engineering-oriented, building stuff all the time, very creative people and they came to MIT wanting to do something impactful for the world. And they assumed that they could.

They assumed that the options were there. But maybe they didn’t really know where to look.

Desiree: The unifying features of the MIT student is that they’re really hard working and they want to do good in the world.

There are unique challenges today that weren’t there ten or fifteen years ago. A lot of external pressures from social media, as an example, or the media more generally, about problems that are facing the earth, science, and society.

[Today’s students are] living in this very complex world, where they might not feel like they can make a positive impact through science and technology because problems are bigger than science and technology, or the problems are just too big in general. One of our jobs is to help them navigate how they can use their education to not just meet societal needs, but to fulfill their own dreams and career aspirations.

I think that’s one of our big privileges – trying to help them navigate those paths.

If you were talking with a prospective student to come here as an undergraduate, is there any advice you would give to a young woman?

Josephine: Pursue it. Take the opportunities as they arise along the way and see where they lead. When I started 15 years ago as an undergrad, I would not have imagined that I would be sitting here today, but along the way the dream had room to grow. My best advice is don’t be too confined on where you have to end, but let it evolve and see where it can lead.

Cathy: I would second that and say to keep an open mind.

There’s just so many different perspectives to be found if you do keep an open mind. Even in considering a career path, a lot of students decide pretty early on that they want to go into industry or into the public sector or into research. But I think that depending on what you want to achieve, some of these could be better than others for accomplishing that goal. I sometimes see students confine themselves to a particular career path before they’ve even given much thought to what they want to achieve.

Josephine: I was like that. I had a clear plan for exactly which company in which city I was going to end up in when I started. Departing from that along the way was like pulling off a band aid really, really, really slowly! So, maybe trying to not do that would be my best advice!

Desiree: People should take advantage of all the opportunities that are in front of them when they’re coming into any place – and MIT especially. Don’t let other people be the ones to tell you ‘no.’ You should be the one that closes doors for yourself, not other people.

Anything you would like to share about your current research project?

Josephine: I’ve come full circle. I’m back to the reinforced concrete that inspired me to become an engineer in the first place. [Initially] I started by being inspired by reinforced concrete and then I learned how complex concrete is and I thought, ‘I’ll never have anything to do with that material again.’ Now, I’m back to looking at [it] and have found some new shapes where we can take out quite a lot of the concrete part and can get a similar behavior. That’s exciting.

sector. Over the last few years, I’ve been looking into how we can help guide the adoption of self-driving cars by cities and governments towards a desirable outcome, reducing our energy consumption, for example. It’s a whole open field of problems, but we’re starting to get some insights on how modern machine learning techniques can help us answer some questions about what types of rules we can adopt that can lead to better outcomes.

Desiree: In my field, one of the things that has come to light recently is a huge gap in the pace of innovation in a chemical company or a manufacturing company and the pace of discovery in environmental chemistry. It’s very slow in the environmental geosciences where we might study one chemical over the course of five or six years and then know a little bit about its environmental fate or behavior. That’s really too slow to inform any industrial process engineering or chemical design. One of the things my group is interested in how you increase the pace of discovery in environmental chemical sciences, whether it be through high-throughput experimentation or computational tools or some combination of those. This could potentially inform the design process in a year or much shorter development timelines, so that we can enable the discoveries that we need to meet environmental and social challenges, but also do so in a way that doesn’t lead to further environmental damage.

“ I think one of the most compelling aspects [of being at MIT] is influence on the students. At the grad level, that’s clearly very good for research. At the undergrad level, making any difference in the undergraduate education of the next generation of leaders in engineering is phenomenal.”

– Professor Wu

Cathy: My journey totally changed when I learned about self-driving cars and all I wanted to do was help them happen faster. Partway through my PhD, there was a study that basically said it’s not clear that self-driving cars are going to make things better. That changed my trajectory again somewhat dramatically. I had to realize that just making self-driving cars happen is potentially not solving our problems because they can potentially dramatically increase the energy consumption of the transportation 27

Engineers Put Leonardo da Vinci’s Bridge Design to the Test Proposed bridge would have been the world’s longest at the time; new analysis shows it would have worked

Alumni News Photo: Gretchen Ertl

In 1502 A.D., Sultan Bayezid II

sent out the Renaissance equivalent of a government RFP (request for proposals), seeking a design for a bridge to connect Istanbul with its neighbor city Galata. Leonardo da Vinci, already a well-known artist and inventor, came up with a novel bridge design that he described in a letter to the Sultan and sketched in a small drawing in his notebook.

He didn’t get the job. But 500 years after his death, the design for what would have been the world’s longest bridge span of its time intrigued researchers at MIT, who wondered how thought-through Leonardo’s concept was and whether it really would have worked.

Spoiler alert: Leonardo knew what he was doing.

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To study the question, recent graduate student Karly Bast MEng ’19, working with professor of architecture and of civil and environmental engineering John Ochsendorf and undergraduate Michelle Xie, tackled the problem by analyzing the available documents, the possible materials and construction methods that were available at the time, and the geological conditions at the proposed site, which was a river

estuary called the Golden Horn. Ultimately, the team built a detailed scale model to test the structure’s ability to stand and support weight, and even to withstand settlement of its foundations.

The results of the study were presented in Barcelona this week at the conference of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures. They will also be featured in a talk at Draper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, later this month and in an episode of the PBS program NOVA, set to air on Nov. 13.

A flattened arch In Leonardo’s time, most masonry bridge supports were made in the form of conventional semicircular arches, which would have required 10 or more piers along the span to support such a long bridge. Leonardo’s bridge concept was dramatically different — a flattened arch that would be tall enough to allow a sailboat to pass underneath with its mast in place, as illustrated in his sketch, but that would cross the wide span with a single enormous arch.

The bridge would have been about 280 meters long (though Leonardo himself was using a different measurement system,

since the metric system was still a few centuries off), making it the longest span in the world at that time, had it been built.

“It’s incredibly ambitious,” Bast says. “It was about 10 times longer than typical bridges of that time.”

The design also featured an unusual way of stabilizing the span against lateral motions — something that has resulted in the collapse of many bridges over the centuries. To combat that, Leonardo proposed abutments that splayed outward on either side, like a standing subway rider widening her stance to balance in a swaying car.

In his notebooks and letter to the Sultan, Leonardo provided no details about the materials that would be used or the method of construction. Bast and the team analyzed the materials available at the time and concluded that the bridge could only have been made of stone, because wood or brick could not have carried the loads of such a long span. And they concluded that, as in classical masonry bridges such as those built by the Romans, the bridge would stand on its own under the force of gravity, without any fasteners or mortar to hold the stone together.

To prove that, they had to build a model and demonstrate its stability. That required figuring out how to slice up the complex shape into individual blocks that could be assembled into the final structure. While the full-scale bridge would have been made up of thousands of stone blocks, they decided on a design with 126 blocks for their model, which was built at a scale of 1 to 500 (making it about 32 inches long). Then the individual blocks were made on a 3D printer, taking about six hours per block to produce.

“It was time-consuming, but 3D printing allowed us to accurately recreate this very complex geometry,” Bast says.

Testing the design’s feasibility This is not the first attempt to reproduce Leonardo’s basic bridge design in physical form. Others, including a pedestrian bridge in Norway, have been inspired by his design, but in that case modern materials — steel and concrete — were used, so that construction provided no information about the practicality of Leonardo’s engineering.

“That was not a test to see if his design would work with the technology from his time,” Bast says. But because of the nature of gravity-supported masonry, the faithful scale model, albeit made of a different material, would provide such a test.

“It’s all held together by compression only,” she says. “We wanted to really show that the forces are all being transferred within the structure,” which is key to ensuring that the bridge would stand solidly and not topple.

As with actual masonry arch bridge construction, the “stones” were supported by a scaffolding structure as they were assembled, and only after they were all in place could the scaffolding be removed to allow the structure to support itself. Then it came time to insert the final piece in the structure, the keystone at the very top of the arch.

“When we put it in, we had to squeeze it in. That was the critical moment when we first put the bridge together. I had a lot of doubts” as to whether it would all work, Bast recalls.

But “when I put the keystone in, I thought, ‘this is going to

“ We wanted to really show that the forces are all being transferred within the structure.” work.’ And after that, we took the scaffolding out, and it stood up.”

“It’s the power of geometry” that makes it work, she says.

“This is a strong concept. It was well thought out.” Score another victory for Leonardo.

“Was this sketch just freehanded, something he did in 50 seconds, or is it something he really sat down and thought deeply about? It’s difficult to know” from the available historical material, she says. But proving the effectiveness of the design suggests that Leonardo really did work it out carefully and thoughtfully, she says. “He knew how the physical world works.”

He also apparently understood that the region was prone to earthquakes, and incorporated features such as the spread footings that would provide extra stability. To test the structure’s resilience, Bast and Xie built the bridge on two movable platforms and then moved one away from the other to simulate the foundation movements that might result from weak soil. The bridge showed resilience to the horizontal movement, only deforming slightly until being stretched to the point of complete collapse.

The design may not have practical implications for modern bridge designers, Bast says, since today’s materials and methods provide many more options for lighter, stronger designs. But the proof of the feasibility of this design sheds more light on what ambitious construction projects might have been possible using only the materials and methods of the early Renaissance. And it once again underscores the brilliance of one of the world’s most prolific inventors.

It also demonstrates, Bast says, that “you don’t necessarily need fancy technology to come up with the best ideas.”

By David Chandler/MIT News

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Alumni Profiles

Michael Zeppieri ’04 SM MBA Michael Zeppieri wanted to be an engineer and MIT was his dream school.

Alumni News

“For anyone considering a career in engineering, MIT is an aspiration,” he says. “But, coming from a humble, working-class, immigrant family, the path to get there was somewhat elusive.” The influence of veterans in his family and community resulted in an affinity for military service, which ultimately led Michael to choose the United States Military Academy at West Point for his undergraduate engineering studies. Michael went on to serve in the Army as a combat engineer officer, primarily supporting peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.

When he made the decision to pursue graduate school, Michael debated between an MBA and an advanced engineering degree. That’s when he discovered Leaders for Global Operations (LGO), MIT’s two-year, dual degree program.

“LGO enabled me to pursue both of my interests simultaneously. I owe a debt of gratitude to Matthew Bromberg, Micah Samuels and Brent Beabout, three veterans and LGO alumni who helped me find my path to MIT. The stars aligned. LGO gave me the opportunity to attain the education I wanted as I transitioned back to civilian life. It was the realization of a dream I’d been nurturing since high school.”

Michael went on to earn an SM in Civil and Environmental Engineering and an MBA through MIT’s Sloan School of Management through LGO. He spent the decade after graduation working for Boeing, an LGO partner company, and remained active with the LGO community by regularly visiting campus to interview and recruit students. When Michael became director of innovation services at Skanska, a multinational construction and project development company with an office in Boston, he found he missed engaging with MIT students.

“There is something indescribably inspiring and energizing from just visiting campus and walking down the Infinite Corridor.” He reached out to Course One and became involved in the MIT CEE Internship Program.

“The greatest skillset I learned from MIT was the ability to dissect and solve problems in a technical world,” Mike says.

“ My career is a reflection of those alumni who took the time to mentor me at critical milestones in my development…. I feel that I have a duty to give back to the MIT community. MIT gave me so much. I would tell other alumni that it’s not just what you’re getting out of the students, it’s also mentoring and directing their passion towards finding a career path in life.”

“This is an incredibly exciting time to be in construction.

One challenge we have in this industry is that technology is coming at us fast and furiously. It’s still very much a legacy industry, and it’s going through the transformation that manufacturing went through 20 or 30 years ago. I enjoy the challenge of understanding and adopting technology that can change the built environment. Where I see the value of working with MIT undergrads is that they’re already in that headspace. Despite their lack of career knowledge or industry experience, they’re incredibly good at dissecting and solving relevant construction industry challenges.”

Now in his third year working with MIT CEE’s Internship Program, Mike says students have exceeded his expectations. He gave his first intern augmented reality—a new technology with practical applications for construction— and asked him to prove out its limitations. His second intern experimented with drones and reality capture.

“Both interns ran with it. They created prototypes that demonstrated their keen understanding of aligning these technologies to the problem statement we presented to them. We still use the prototypes they developed to demonstrate and communicate these technologies to a variety of stakeholders and audiences.”

Mike highly encourages other businesses to work with MIT students.

“My career is a reflection of those alumni who took the time to mentor me at critical milestones in my development. Now that I’m at a place where I’m on the other side of that story, I feel that I have a duty to give back to the MIT community.

MIT gave me so much. I would tell other alumni that it’s not just what you’re getting out of the students, it’s also mentoring and directing their passion towards finding a career path in life.”

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Alumni Profiles

Alejandra Ortiz ’15 PhD As an enterprising high school

student, Alejandra Ortiz cleaned the marine biology research lab at the University of Miami in Florida and was rewarded with opportunities to help with research experiments. It was the springboard that eventually landed her farther north near the Maine coast where she is an assistant professor of geology at Colby College.

“Parsons Laboratory was such a home for me,” she says.

“They were all so welcoming even to someone who hadn’t taken physics since high school and hadn’t an engineering background.”

Ortiz says she found the faculty and students supportive of her interests and marvels at the opportunities available to her as a student, which included field trips and laboratory research. The work fueled her desire to conduct her own research.

“One of my favorite parts of the WHOI program was the interactions with top scientists who visited and lectured about their research,” she says. “We would have informal lunches and dinners and discuss their work on a more intimate scale.

It was pretty unusual [to have that opportunity.]”

Ortiz also found Graduate Women at MIT, a student-led organization, to offer a rich networking outlet with numerous workshops, clubs and mentoring opportunities.

After stops at the University of Indiana for postdoctoral research, and North Carolina State University as an assistant professor of engineering, Ortiz is excited about her new role at Colby and overseeing research in its Coastal Geomorphology Lab which she began in August 2019.

“My research focuses on the ecogeomorphic evolution of coastal landscapes,” says Ortiz. “Geologists tend to work within greater time scales – think centuries – and their questions tend to be less about application and more about understanding the underlying process at work. Engineers tend to look at much shorter time frames and try to understand the problem so they can fix it. I’m very much a bridge between coastal engineering and coastal geologists. I can talk to both” The work has allowed her to travel the world studying one of the globe’s biggest environmental concerns: rising sea levels.

The average global sea level has been rising over the past century, with increasingly accelerated rates of sea level rise occurring.

“We can’t protect the coastlines until we understand the processes that are driving the change,” says Ortiz. “My work is trying to understand where these changes will happen, over what timeframes and how quickly they’ll take place.”

Alumni News

Along the way, Ortiz studied wetlands and marshes at Wellesley College, where she majored in Geosciences and Classical Civilizations, and earned her Masters in Civil Engineering and doctorate in Marine Geology from MIT’s joint program with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI).

At MIT, she quickly found her focus in Course One.

Now, Ortiz has the platform to engage the next generation of citizens, if not future civil and environmental engineers, to support efforts that protect our coastlines.

“I love teaching at Colby. Our classes are small; I have 11 students this semester. In addition, Colby has distribution requirements, so even if you’re majoring in art, you need to take two laboratory science classes. I have a chance to expose young minds to looking at the world a little differently.

It’s important to me that my students are knowledgeable about the basics of science and if they don’t know the answers, they know where to look for the answers. My students are so engaged – it’s fantastic!”

“ We can’t protect the coastlines until we understand the processes that are driving the change. My work is trying to understand where these changes will happen, over what timeframes and how quickly they’ll take place.”

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Alumni Profiles

Zara L’Heureux ’13 Field trips during her junior and

senior years at MIT jumpstarted Zara L’ Heureux’s desire to generate her own research in the quest to address climate change.

“I liked the idea of designing and building anything related to energy and the environment so I was naturally attracted to CEE,” says L’Heureux.

Alumni News

Working alongside doctoral candidates on their research and supporting them in the field with trips to Hawaii, Florida and southern Africa to collect data, she says it was a “no-brainer” to go directly to graduate school after MIT. “Getting my PhD allowed me ownership over my own research and to work on something I was passionate about for several years.”

Today, L’Heureux is farther along on her path to tackle climate change serving as a Fellow at the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), an agency within the U.S. Department of Energy. ARPA-E focuses on funding highrisk high-reward energy technologies. L’Heureux researches and identifies areas that ARPA-E has not previously invested in and develops programs around them.

“We’re looking for the cutting edge, break-through, revolutionary, technical innovations across the energy spectrum,” she says. “We do the research and analysis to determine what is revolutionary in a particular energy field and encourage applicants to propose solutions to achieve these technical targets.”

Universities, national labs, large and small non-profits, private companies – these groups are pursuing technical areas ARPA-E has identified as challenging and innovative in a particular field of energy. L’Heureux and her colleagues encourage these applicants to propose solutions to achieve established technical targets. This has allowed L’Heureux to become involved in exciting research that she anticipates will support the global efforts to reduce the impact of climate change.

For example, off the shore in Scotland is the world’s only installation of floating off-shore wind turbines. These massive

“ Getting involved with research makes your classes come to life, because you’re actually working on or implementing something that you’ve studied. Being able to contribute in a hands-on research project is a great learning experience. And, TREX is a great opportunity to spend a couple of weeks collecting and analyzing data and understanding the process of field research.” machines are so far out to sea they’re able to take advantage of higher wind speeds while not being visible to those onshore. L’Heureux and her colleagues see this as an area in which the U.S. can be a leader – with some adjustments.

“We’re driving substantial cost reductions in these systems by encouraging teams to rethink the design and pursue control co-design so they can take advantage of the different dynamics combined with wind, the water and waves,” she says. “Instead of building massive structures that are very expensive, we are encouraging teams to build smarter designs taking advantage of a new control paradigm rather than trying to emulate onshore turbine controls. These are quite challenging to design.”

ARPA-E’s “hands-on” management style allows L’Heureux to meet with her teams regularly to review their progress and identify challenges so the work moves forward and meets the technical metrics and targets set. Working with the people and organizations behind this work is exciting.

“ARPA-E is a very neat place to be to keep on top of the cutting-edge work being done across the energy spectrum,” she says.

Having completed the first year of her two-year fellowship, L’Heureux is contemplating her next career move: academia or the entrepreneurial route. Either way, she expects her research to remain on the cutting-edge of energy technology.

It’s no wonder her advice to Course One students is to take advantage of research projects through UROP (MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program) and TREX (Traveling Research Environmental Experiences).

“Getting involved with research makes your classes come to life, because you’re actually working on or implementing something that you’ve studied,” she says. “Being able to contribute in a hands-on research project is a great learning experience. And, TREX is a great opportunity to spend a couple of weeks collecting and analyzing data and understanding the process of field research.

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“Don’t take a class you think may be ‘easy.’ Take the classes that challenge you or are about a topic that you’re passionate about. You’ll learn so much more if you’re interested in the material and really dedicated to the class even if you don’t get an ‘A’. No one remembers their easy ‘A’ class.”

Alumni Profiles

Daniel Zarrilli ’99 SM Daniel Zarrilli, New York City’s

Chief Climate Policy Advisor, was named a Fellow by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in October. ASCE members elected to Fellow status have made celebrated contributions and developed creative solutions that have enhanced lives. Just 3 percent of ASCE members hold this prestigious honor.

Notable successes include launching a comprehensive $20 billion climate adaptation program, aligning the city’s GHG reductions with the 1.5C target of the Paris Agreement, committing to divest the city’s pension funds from fossil-fuel reserve owners and investing billions into climate solutions, suing fossil fuel companies for the damage caused by climate change, reaching a first-of-its-kind agreement with FEMA to provide new climate-smart flood maps and delivering on Mayor de Blasio’s groundbreaking 2015 OneNYC resilience strategy which incorporated equity into New York City’s sustainability efforts for the first time.

Zarrilli credits the time he spent in Course 1 for broadening his perspective on the role of civil engineering in society and putting him on the path to bringing the problem-solving skills of engineering into the policy challenges of the 21st century.

“There is no better place than MIT CEE to learn how to apply the traits of civil engineering to global challenges like climate change and inequality,” said Zarrilli. “I’m thrilled that the department continues to educate the next generation of engineering leaders to tackle these problems and build a better world.”

Until recently, Zarrilli served on NOAA’s advisory committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment. He also concluded a three-year term on FEMA’s National Advisory Council and advised the State of Louisiana on its 2017 Coastal Master Plan update. He is a licensed professional engineer in New York. In addition to his MIT degree, he earned a B.S. in civil engineering from Lehigh University.

“ There is no better place than MIT CEE to learn how to apply the traits of civil engineering to global challenges like climate change and inequality. I’m thrilled the department continues to educate the next generation of engineering leaders to tackle these problems and build a better world.”

Alumni News

Zarrilli is preparing America’s largest city for the future. Under his leadership, New York recently released its newest longterm strategic plan, OneNYC 2050, which, he says, “includes bold new actions to confront our climate crisis, achieve equity and strengthen our democracy. In my time with the Mayor’s Office, we’ve positioned New York City as the global leader in the fight against climate change.”

Dear Alumni: we welcome your career news.

You may contact us at one@mit.edu 33

Alumni Panel and New Research Dinner

Alumni News The alumni panel captures the attention of students with stories of their career plans and job searches.

Seated (from left): Tiziana Smith, Mohammad Javad Abdolhosseini Qomi, Teresa Yamana, Eben Cross, Chao Zhang.

The diverse professional

opportunities for CEE graduates were on display at the Graduate Student and Postdoc Alumni Panel and networking reception held in November. Four recent CEE doctoral gradates and one postdoc returned to campus to share their professional experiences and career path advice in a panel discussion in collaboration with a new graduate professional development seminar.

Panel participants included: Eben Cross, a former CEE postdoc and the Co-Founder and CTO of QuantAQ, 34

a company that develops low-cost air quality sensor technology; Tiziana Smith, who earned her master’s in Technology and Policy and a PhD in Hydrology in CEE and is a Water Resources Specialist at the World Bank; Mohammad Javad Abdolhosseini Qomi, who earned his PhD in CEE and is now an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine; Teresa Yamana, who earned her undergraduate and PhD degrees in CEE and is a research scientist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health; and, Chao Zhang, who earned his PhD through the Interdepartmental Program in Transportation and is a research scientist at Amazon based in Palo Alto.

Professors Heidi Nepf and Desirée Plata share their labs’ current research.

More than 40 graduate students attended the panel discussion which was followed by a networking reception with alumni and the department’s annual New Research Dinner. Together, the events allowed students to gain insight into the job search and make professional connections.

The event was a tremendous success, so much so that the department plans to reach out to alumni to participate in the panel next year.

Following the networking reception, guests enjoyed dinner followed by slide presentations of current research presented

by Donald and Martha Harleman Professor Heidi Nepf and Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor Desirée Plata.

Professor Nepf illustrated how her lab is working to develop wave attenuation and sediment transport models to help restore coastal marshes. These marshes protect inland areas and serve as a buffer for nutrient run-off. Strong currents and waves can take away find sediment and uproot vegetation.

Developing a successful transport model will improve the restoration and management of vegetated landscapes.

Professor Plata shared an overview of her work in environmental chemistry. Plata’s efforts center on minimizing the environmental impact of emerging technologies —with a particular focus on nanomaterials and the energy sector.

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Alumni Panel and New Research Dinner

Alumni News 36

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Looking Ahead TREX 2020 – January 2020

This year’s Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences will be the program’s 18th trip. Conducted during MIT’s January Independent Activities Period, 15 students will perform two weeks of field research in Hawaii’s Big Island, overseen by two faculty and three teaching assistants. Students will spend a week at Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering preparing for their research trip.

CEE Research Speed Dating – February 10, 2020 from 3:00 – 7:30 pm Samberg Conference Center 7th floor

Please join us for the 9th annual CEE Research Speed Dating event. This year’s theme is “Engineering Solutions in Ever Changing Environments and Infrastructures.” In addition to talks by students, postdocs and faculty, there will be a panel discussion on Computing for a Resilient Society with faculty and Dan Huttenlocher, Dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. An e-poster session and networking reception will follow. If you are interested in attending, R.S.V.P. here.

Commencement – May 2020

May 28 – Doctoral candidates receive their diplomas and hoods at a morning ceremony in Killian Court.

May 29 – Bachelor’s and Master’s candidates receive their diplomas at Commencement Exercises in Kilian Court.

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Thumbs Up! Darryl Pomicter ’68 and (right) Edward “Jack” Hall ’65, SM ’67, CE ’69 attended the CEE New Research Dinner held in November and enjoyed the opportunity to meet graduate students and faculty and listen to a discussion on new research.

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Sierra Rosenzweig ’20 leans into the wind on top of Mauna Kea. TREX students toured the Submillimeter Array, a series of radio telescopes. The high elevation and remote location of Mauna Kea makes it an excellent site for astronomical observations. Full story on page 16.

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