Course One - Fall/Winter 2017

Course One Newsletter | Fall/Winter 2017

There’s something in the air

CEE ABET Accreditation

Course One Carnival

Recycled Plastic in Concrete

New Research Reception

New Course 1 major prepares students for careers of the future

CEE took over Lobby 10 for the first Course One Carnival to promote the undergraduate degree

Adding bits of irradiated plastic water bottles could cut cement industry’s carbon emissions

New Research Reception gives alumni and the community an inside look at research and initiatives in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

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Civil and Environmental Engineering

cee.mit.edu

Kicking off a New Semester Beastly summer heat and the chaos of Registration Day didn’t deter dozens of students, postdocs, staff and faculty from partaking in a Faculty-Student soccer game. Held on September 5, the pickup game encouraged new and returning community members to collaborate and strategize for the match.

Players brought a wide variety of skill levels, from beginners to seasoned soccer experts, but the players bonded and quickly found a strategy that worked for everyone. Camaraderie was evident in each pass, substitute and water break, making for a fun, albeit sweaty, event.

Organized by Professors Otto Cordero and Admir Masic, the soccer game is one of a number of community-building initiatives in the department.

Department initiatives such as the Faculty-Student soccer game, the CEE Band, and weekly TGIF events offer unique opportunities for community members to interact with their peers in a fun and casual way.

The friendly competition at the September soccer game drew a crowd of spectators and ended with a 1-0 win by the faculty team, with a goal from Visiting Associate Professor Roman Stocker.

Letter from Markus

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ABET Accredidation

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Community Updates

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Course One Carnival

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Faculty Updates

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Unprecedented data on the atmosphere

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Research Highlights

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Cross-Disciplinary Seed Funds

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In the Department

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Recycled Plastic in Concrete

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Alumni Updates

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New Research Reception

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Looking Forward

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A Note From Markus

At MIT CEE, we continue to define the future of civil and environmental engineering, and in doing so, prepare our students to change the world.

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Dear CEE Alumni and Friends, As 2017 comes to a close, I want to extend a warm holiday greeting to you and your families. I sincerely hope this year has treated you well and that 2018 proves to be even better. It certainly has been a busy semester in CEE; I encourage you to browse our fall/winter Course One newsletter for department and faculty updates since our last edition.

In October, we welcomed assistant professor Dave Des Marais to our faculty, and we are excited for future faculty additions in 2018. There have also been a number of impressive research accomplishments from our current faculty. To name a few, professor Jesse Kroll led a team of researchers that identified previously unknown organic compounds in the atmosphere; Professor Oral Buyukozturk worked with a group of with MIT students to use recycled plastic water bottles and make stronger concrete; and two pairs of faculty joined forces for new collaborations with department Seed Fund Awards.

At MIT CEE, we continue to define the future of civil and environmental engineering, and in doing so, prepare our students to change the world. I am proud to announce that our new undergraduate degree program received ABET accreditation this fall. This accreditation reinforces that our program provides a solid foundation for our students to be well-rounded engineers.

Looking forward, our students are again traveling to Hawaii to do fieldwork as part of our Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences (TREX) program over IAP. Also, Professor Otto Cordero is hosting a special subject, Agricultural Microbial Ecology in Israel, over IAP. I look forward to sharing more about the outcomes of these programs in our next edition of Course One. It is your generous support that make our research and fieldwork opportunities possible for our community. I thank each of you who has given to CEE, it truly makes a difference. As always, please stop by the department and say “hello� if you have the chance, and have a wonderful holiday.

Best regards,

Markus J. Buehler Department Head and McAfee Professor of Engineering

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Civil and Environmental Engineering undergraduate program receives ABET Accreditation Course 1 major prepares students for careers of the future Students in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)’s undergraduate program tailor their degrees to their interests, equipping them with the skills and knowledge needed to tackle major challenges in the areas of their choice.

The Course 1 major recently received general engineering accreditation from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), a nonprofit organization that certifies academic programs in science and engineering disciplines for adequately preparing students for the professional vocations associated with their program.

“Engineering accreditation of our program is important to our students, particularly those who are considering careers in engineering practice,” said Colette Heald, associate professor of CEE and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, associate department head of CEE and chair of the department’s Undergraduate Education Committee (UEC).

One such student is Brenda Stern ’17, MEng ’18, who as an undergraduate pursued the mechanics and materials core in CEE. “The ABET accreditation means that I am eligible to take the Fundamentals of Engineering exam and, upon passing, get my Engineer in Training certification, which will help me eventually get my Professional Engineer license,” Stern said.

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The Course 1 major includes subjects that teach necessary skills and methods for students to apply in a variety of careers, such as 1.000 (Computer Programming

for Engineering Applications) and 1.101 (Introduction to Civil and Environmental Engineering Design I), a lab-based subject that encourages open-ended design projects and offers a significant amount of creative freedom for tackling a myriad of issues.

“What makes 1.101 so impressive is the sheer number of very tangible skills and experiences that I will carry with me always,” CEE junior René Andrés García Franceschini said in a blog post about the subject last year. “Taking our project from idea to reality was just as instructive as the hours spent discussing and compromising as a team, or learning how to properly use shop tools, or even building our own professional web-based portfolio that we can use for the rest of our professional careers.”

Other subjects offered pair unique fieldwork experiences with lectures and labs at

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MIT. These classes are both rigorous and stimulating, while teaching students employable skills for both academia and professional vocations.

“We completely revised and made significant improvements to the undergraduate program a few years ago, so for this program to be accredited is a tremendous opportunity for our students to develop their careers,” said Markus Buehler, McAfee Professor of Engineering and head of CEE. “The accreditation is testament to the dedication of

our faculty and staff, especially our UEC and Academic Programs Office, to the success of our students.”

When reviewing academic programs, the ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission takes into consideration the curriculum and subjects offerings, student outcomes, educational objectives and signs of continuous improvement. The 18-month process included a visit to the department, where members of the commission meet with students and faculty and review laboratory spaces.

CEE launched the new undergraduate

major in 2014 to offer better opportunities for students to specialize in a specific area by creating a program that addresses a certain topic, and to strengthen their education in fundamental engineering skills. The program also equips student with skills and knowledge for them to apply what they have learned to emerging fields and domains.

As part of the degree, Course 1 students combine foundational degree requirements with classes from three core areas: environment; mechanics and materials; and systems engineering. Electives can be combined to create individualized “tracks” for specializing in a certain topic. Since its inception, students have created tracks on topics including environmental engineering science; structures, architecture, and design;

approach to fieldwork. CEE also launched the program in Materials in Art, Archaeology and Architecture (ONE-MA3) in 2016, which offers a similar opportunity that aligns with the mechanics and materials core.

Additionally, seniors in the program pursue research projects as part of 1.013 (Senior Civil and Environmental Engineering Design), CEE’s “capstone” class that give students experience working on research with realworld constraints and standards.

The ABET accreditation extends retroactively to October 1, 2014.

“The Undergraduate Education Committee continues to work with the faculty to improve the program in response to student feedback,” Heald said. “This includes improving the sequencing of subjects and developing tracks which reflect the career interests of our students.”

This article was written by Carolyn Schmitt of CEE Communications.

and systems and urban design.

The program also places an emphasis on gaining hands-on experience, both in the lab and in the field. For instance, Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences (TREX) is a required subject for the environment core, and was lauded by the ABET commission for its innovative

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Community Updates Jaden Smith visits CEE

Actor and rapper Jaden Smith visited MIT on September 11, and stopped by CEE to learn more about Course 1. Undergraduates Amber VanHemel, Mark Mockett and David Wu, as well as department head Markus Buehler, met with Smith to talk about their experiences in CEE, including Wu’s participation in Materials in Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (ONE-MA3).

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Graduate student Justin Montgomery wins Student Research Competition at International Association for Mathematical Geosciences Conference Graduate student Justin Montgomery was deemed the winner of the Student Research Competition at the annual conference of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) for his research on hierarchical Bayesian modeling of shale gas production.

The conference was held in Perth, Australia.

Graduate student Grace Gu receives Graduate Excellence in Materials Science award and wins silver medal for Graduate Student Award by Materials Research Society Graduate student Grace Gu of the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics received the Graduate Excellence in Materials Science (GEMS) award with Diamond ranking for her presentation at the Materials Science & Technology (MS&T) conference. The conference was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from October 8 through 12 and was hosted by the American Ceramic Society. She also received the silver medal for the Graduate Student Award for the Materials Research Society fall meeting, held November 26 to December 1 in Boston.

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Graduate student Maitham Makki Alhubail receives Shoji Award Graduate student Maitham Makki Alhubail received the Shoji Award on October 17. The Shoji award, established by Dr. Mikio Shoji in 2011, is given to a student for Innovation in Information Technology in Civil Engineering.

Research from graduate student Justin Montgomery featured on Bloomberg

Research from graduate student Justin Montgomery and Francis O’Sullivan, director of research for the MIT Energy Initiative, was featured on Bloomberg. The pair found that the role that technology has played in the tight oil boom has been overstated and this is potentially leading to overly optimistic oil production forecasts by the United States Energy Information Administration.

Montgomery was also interviewed by Bloomberg TV on December 6 to discuss his research.

Read More

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CEE Rising Stars Workshop brings distinguished early-career women to campus On October 12 and 13, CEE hosted 20 distinguished women for the second CEE Rising Stars Workshop to provide insight into careers in academia. The event featured faculty panels, research presentations, networking sessions and campus tours.

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CEE Research Affiliate Hao Sun named one of Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 in Science CEE Research Affiliate Hao Sun, also a former postdoctoral associate in the department, was recently named one of Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 in Science for his work on detecting vibrations in buildings and modeling their structural health. Sun is currently an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Course 1 Carnival attracts big crowd in Lobby 10 The Course 1 Carnival rolled into Lobby 10 on November 16, bringing a host of activities, games and information for prospective majors. Featuring a photo booth, ring toss, prize wheel and informational booths about department offerings, the Carnival was a fun, informal way for prospective majors to learn about the exciting and innovative opportunities in CEE. The event was supported by current undergraduate students, who came out in full force to enthusiastically share their experiences in the different 1-ENG degree tracks. The 1-ENG degree program provides students with an opportunity to select a core in one of three areas: mechanics and materials; environment; or systems.

Each core had their own booth at the carnival.

The systems booth showcased work done by participants of CEE’s Freshmen Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP), who mapped out different potential reconfigurations of Boston’s transit system based on different criteria, including population density, average household income and average age.

Assistant professor Ben Kocar hosted the environment booth, which featured the department’s Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences (TREX) subject. TREX frequents Hawaii to conduct a variety of field experiments and collect data to bring back to campus. Former TREX students also spoke to attendees about the fieldwork experience and showed the air quality sensors and unpiloted aerial vehicles that the team used to collect data. To attract carnival attendees, Junior Amber VanHemel dressed up as a T-Rex dinosaur, a play on the name TREX, to attract visitors to learn about the fieldwork program.

For the mechanics and materials booth, Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Professor Admir Masic similarly hosted a station on program in Materials in Art, Archaeology and Architecture (ONE-MA3) and brought mosaics students created in Italy to highlight some of the hands-on activities that students partake in on the fieldwork program.

Throughout the night, CEE students and faculty networked with prospective students, participated in carnival games, and answered questions about Course 1. Prizes for the games were new CEE swag items, including backpacks, notebooks, sticky notes and winter hats. The carnival was a huge success, with about 50 eager attendees and many curious onlookers.

The Course 1 Carnival was one of a series of new recruitment events hosted to promote the 1-ENG major and the innovative fieldwork experiences in the department to freshmen.

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Faculty Updates

Professor Pedro Reis

Professor Elfatih Eltahir

Visiting Professor Pedro Reis was elected an American

Breene M. Kerr Professor Elfatih Eltahir spoke on a panel

Physical Society (APS) fellow. He also received a 2017 APS

about the impact of climate change on malaria at Harvard’s

Early Career Award earlier this year. Reis is one of twelve

T.H. Chan School of Public Health on October 23. Eltahir

members of the MIT community to recently receive honors

discussed his research into the various variables involved

and awards from APS.

in the spread of malaria and the creation of models for predicting future transmission of the disease

Read More Here

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Read More Here

Professor John Ochsendorf

Professor Oral Buyukozturk

Class of 1942 Professor of CEE and Professor of

Professor Oral Buyukozturk recently received a $1.3 million

Architecture John A. Ochsendorf donated an exhibition

research grant from Shell to develop innovative technologies

he created on renowned vault builders Rafael Guastavino

to detect and characterize oil operation induced earthquakes

and his son to organizers creating a museum about

in areas near urban populations and to study the effects in

the Guastavinos. The exhibit, “Palaces for the People:

neighborhood buildings. These operations and their locations

Guastavino and America’s Great Public Spaces,”

are of significant concern and are challenging to characterize

supplements Ochsendorf’s 2010 book, Guastavino Vaulting:

from both social and scientific perspectives. Buyukozturk

The Art of Structural Tile. The exhibit launched at the Boston

is the Principal Investigator for the project, along with co-PI

Public Library in 2012 and was donated to the Christmount

Nafi Toksöz of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and

Conference Center in Black Mountain, NC, where

Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

Guastavino’s estate is located.

Read More Here

Professor Buyukozturk was also invited to participate in a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The meeting was about the role of advanced technologies in structural engineering for more resilient communities. Buyukozturk was one of five speakers participating in the session on innovative technologies, specifically advanced structural and material technologies for smart infrastructure in building more resilient and sustainable communities.

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Faculty Updates

Professor Saurabh Amin

Professor Dave Des Marais

Professor Eduardo Kausel

Robert N. Noyce Career Development

Assistant Professor Dave Des Marais

Professor emeritus Eduardo Kausel

Associate Professor Saurabh Amin

was profiled on MIT News for his

published a textbook entitled “Advanced

delivered two keynote lectures on

research into plant physiology and

Structural Dynamics,” which covers

cyber-security of transportation

how plants naturally respond to

structural dynamics and mechanical

systems, one at the New York

environmental stresses. Des Marais

vibration. The book was created from

University Abu Dhabi’s Transportation

officially joined the department on

decades of Kausel’s lecture notes.

Symposium on November 19, and the

October 1, and works in the Ralph M.

Advanced Structural Dynamics was

other at the Workshop on Dynamic

Parsons Laboratory for Environmental

published by Cambridge University

Games in Management Science in

Science and Engineering.

Press.

Québec, Canada, on October 12.

Read More

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Professor Carolina Osorio

Professor John Williams

Professor Caitlin Mueller

Associate Professor Carolina Osorio was

Professor John Williams taught a

A Mars City Design project

invited to participate in a two-day event

class on Computational Thinking to a

from Assistant Professor of CEE

on “Transforming Mobility” in Barcelona.

group of seniors at Concord Carlisle

and Architecture Caitlin Mueller,

The event was part of the first Audi

High School. Williams was invited by

postdoctoral fellow Valentina Sumini,

Summit that showcased Audi’s urban

Principal Michael Mastrullo and the

and undergraduate student Zoe Lallas,

mobility solutions.

Head of Computer Science Anthony

was featured on MIT News. The urban

Beckwith. The class covered how

design project, called Redwood Forest,

to write a chat application similar to

utilizes the local Mars environment

WhatsApp and how to apply Data

to create dwellings for humans.

Science to Boston City data.

Sumini and Lallas are part of the interdisciplinary team of MIT students working on the project, and Mueller is leading the group.

Read More

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Faculty Updates

Professor Yossi Sheffi

Professor David Simchi-Levi

Yossi Sheffi, Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems

Professor David Simchi-Levi was selected as editor-in-

and CEE, and Director of the Center for Transportation and

chief of Management Science, one of the two flagship

Logistics, wrote an op ed for the Wall Street Journal in which

journals from the Institute for Operations Research and the

he argues that supply-chain managers need to be trained in

Management Sciences (INFORMS). Simchi-Levi served as

“soft skills,� like communications and leadership.

the editor-in-chief of Operations Research, the other flagship journal of INFORMS, between 2007 and 2012. Simchi-Levi

Read More

will assume the role of the editor-in-chief of Management Science on January 1, 2018, and will hold the position through December 31, 2020.

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Professor Admir Masic

Professor Moshe Ben-Akiva

Research from Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career

Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental

Development Professor Admir Masic focuses leveraging

Engineering Moshe Ben-Akiva was awarded the

ancient successes to create new, sustainable materials, a

2017 Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in

concept referred to as an ‘antiqua-inspired’ method. Masic

Transportation Science. The award was given by the

collaborated with a team of international researchers on

Institute for Operations Research and the Management

conceptual review of the opportunities afforded by ancient

Sciences (INFORMS) Transportation Science and Logistics

materials, which was published in Angewandte Chemie

(TSL) Society to Ben-Akiva in recognition of his fundamental

International Edition.

and sustained contributions to transportation science and Read More

logistics and his influence on the field through writings, teaching, service, and nurturing of young professionals.

Ben-Akiva was presented with the award at the TSL

Professor Masic also participated in a panel at the World

Business Meeting held on October 23 at the 2017 INFORMS

Bank Group Youth Summit in Washington, D.C. on

Annual Meeting in Houston. In addition, he gave the TSL

December 4. The summit invited 400 innovators aged 18-35

Plenary Session on October 24 where he presented his

from 100 different countries to D.C. for the two-day event.

work on preference estimation and personalization for smart

Masic contributed to a panel on “Transforming the Jobs &

mobility.

Skills of Tomorrow.”

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Team gathers unprecedented data on atmosphere’s organic chemistry

Colorado forest study provides clearest-ever picture of gases released into the atmosphere and how they change.

For a few weeks over the summer in 2011, teams of scientists from around the world converged on a small patch of ponderosa pine forest in Colorado to carry out one of the most detailed, extended survey of atmospheric chemistry ever attempted in one place, in many cases using new measurement devices created especially for this project. Now, after years of analysis, their comprehensive synthesis of the findings have been released this week.

The teams, which included a group from MIT using a newly-developed device to identify and quantify compounds of carbon, reported their combined results in a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience. Jesse Kroll, MIT associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and of chemical engineering, and James Hunter, an MIT technical instructor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering who was a doctoral student in Kroll’s group at the time of the research, were senior author and lead author, respectively, of the 24 contributors to the report.

Associate Professor Colette Heald of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences was also a co-author.

The organic (carbon-containing) compounds they studied in that patch of Colorado forest play a key role in atmospheric chemical processes that can affect air quality, the health of the ecosystem, and the climate itself. Yet many of these processes remain poorly understood in

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their real-world complexity, and they had never been so rigorously sampled, studied, and quantified in one place before.

“The goal was trying to understand the chemistry associated with organic particulate matter in a forested environment,” Kroll explains. “The various groups took a lot of different measurements using state-of-theart instruments we each had developed.” In doing so, they were able to fill in significant gaps in the inventory of organic compounds in the atmosphere, finding that about a third of them were in the form of previously unmeasured semi-volatile and intermediatevolatility organic compounds (SVOCs and IVOCs).

“We’ve long suspected there were gaps in our measurements of carbon in the atmosphere,” Kroll says. “There seemed to be more aerosols than we can explain by measuring their precursors.”

The MIT team, as well as some of the other research groups, developed instruments that specifically targeted these hard-tomeasure compounds, which Kroll describes as “still in the gas phase, but sticky.” Their stickiness makes it hard to get them through an inlet into a measuring device, but these compounds may play a significant role in

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the formation and alteration of aerosols, tiny airborne particles that can contribute to smog or to the nucleation of raindrops or ice crystals, affecting the Earth’s climate.

“Some of these instruments were used for the first time in this campaign,” Kroll says.

When analyzing the results, which provided unprecedented measurements of the SVOCs and IVOCs, “we realized we had this data set that provided much more information on organic compounds than we ever had before. By bringing the data from all these instruments together into one combined dataset, we were able to describe the organic compounds in the atmosphere in a more comprehensive way than had ever been possible, to figure out what’s really going on.”

It’s a more complicated challenge than it might seem, the researchers point out. A very large number of different organic compounds are constantly being emitted by trees and other vegetation, which vary in their chemical composition, their physical properties, and their ability to react chemically with other compounds. As soon as they enter the air many of the compounds begin to oxidize, which exponentially increases their number and diversity.

The collaborative campaign to characterize

the quantities and reactions of these different compounds took place in a section of the Manitou Experimental Forest Observatory in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Five different instruments were used to collect the data on organic compounds, and three of those had never been used before.

Despite the progress, much remains to be done, the researchers say. While the field measurements provided a detailed profile of the amounts of different compounds over time, it could not identify the specific reactions and pathways that were transforming one set of compounds to another. That kind of analysis requires the direct study of the reactions in a controlled laboratory setting, and that kind of work is ongoing, in Kroll’s MIT lab and elsewhere.

Filling in all these details will make it possible to refine the accuracy of atmospheric models and help to assess such things as strategies to mitigate specific air pollution issues, from ozone to particulate matter, or to assess the sources and removal mechanisms of atmospheric components that affect Earth’s climate.

The measurement team included researchers from the University of Colorado, the California Air Resources Board, the University of

California at Berkeley, the University of Toronto, the University of Innsbruck in Austria, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Edmund Mach Foundation in Italy, Harvard University, the University of Montreal, Aerodyne Research, CarnegieMellon University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Washington.

The work was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This article was written for MIT News by David L. Chandler of the MIT News Office

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Research Highlights

Research from Professor Markus Buehler and lab shows functionalized graphene changes shape in response to heat New research from McAfee Professor of Engineering and Department Head Professor Markus Buehler, along with research scientist Zhao Qin and postdoctoral associate Chun-Teh Chen, on thin layers of functionalized graphene that folds and unfolds into predetermined 3D structures in response to heat was published in Science Advances. The research was conducted in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University.

Read More

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Research from Professor David Simchi-Levi provides critical insight into product pricing for online retailers

A machine-learning algorithm from Professor David Simchi-Levi has helped online retailers determine the ideal price for products. The method led to an increase in revenue, profit and market share for retailers such as Rue La La, Groupon and B2W. It could also be used for other industries, including Read More consumer products, airline and banking.

Research from Professor Charles Harvey shows arsenic in groundwater damages rice yield in Bangladesh

Research from Professor Charles Harvey and graduate student Brittany Huhmann shows that the presence of arsenic in groundwater, deposited through irrigation, damages the rice yield in Bangladesh.

The field study was conducted during the 2015 and 2016 growing seasons. The research was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

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Research from Professor Markus Buehler models mechanism of two-dimensional material that could inform the creation of flexible, transparent electronics

Research from McAfee Professor of Engineering and head of CEE Markus Buehler models the mechanisms of molybdenum disulfide, a two-dimensional material that could inform the creation of flexible, transparent electronics. The research was conducted in collaboration with researchers from Cornell University, King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia, Academia Sinica, a Taiwanese national research academy, and Texas Tech University. The research was published in Nature Materials.

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Research from Professor Oral Buyukozturk finds microscopic properties critical to stronger concrete

Research from Professor Oral Buyukozturk shows that the microscopic properties of cement are key to stronger, more sustainable concrete. Buyukozturk, graduate student Steven Palkovic and Sidney Yip, professor emeritus in Department of Nuclear Engineering, created a computer model to simulate the behavior of individual atoms under a variety of conditions and see how strength develops in concrete materials. The research was published in Journal of the Mechanics and Read More Physics of Solids.

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Professor Xuanhe Zhao creates “living tattoo” that responds to the environment Professor of CEE and Mechanical Engineering Xuanhe Zhao, in collaboration with Professor of EECS and Biological Engineering Timothy Lu, created a “living tattoo” made of genetically programmed living cells that can respond to environmental chemicals and pollutants, in addition to changes in pH and temperature. The 3-D printing technique was published in Advanced Materials.

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Professor Markus Buehler and team create regenerated silk material with higher strength and the ability to hold new shapes McAfee Professor of Engineering and head of CEE Markus Buehler, postdoc Shengjie Ling and research scientist Zhao Qin created reconstituted silk that has higher strength and can be formed into new shapes and structures that are not feasible with natural silk. The paper was published in Read More Nature Communications.

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Establishing interdisciplinary approaches to agriculture and fundamental biological processes Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering awards cross-disciplinary seed funds.

From optimizing food production to feed a growing population to discovering the fundamental behaviors and processes of biopolymers, faculty in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) are leveraging the interdisciplinary nature of the department to establish two new, innovative projects.

H.M. King Bhumibol Professor Dennis McLaughlin, a hydrologist, and Mitsui Chair Professor Serguei Saavedra, a network and community ecologist, are working together to examine the impact of resource allocation and community ecology on crop productivity and resilience. Additionally, assistant professors Tal Cohen and Otto X. Cordero are joining forces in an effort to discover the relationship between the physical and biological processes that underlie how biopolymers are consumed by bacteria.

The projects are funded by CEE’s Cross-Disciplinary Seed Funds, which invites CEE faculty from differing disciplines to apply for funding to support the creation of research projects.

“Through the Cross-Disciplinary Seed Funds and department events such as CEE Research Speed Dating, I encourage faculty members to reflect on how their expertise could be used in conjunction with another faculty member in a disparate area of the department to create new and innovative approaches to a topic,” says Markus Buehler, head of CEE, McAfee Professor of Engineering, and creator of the initiative. “The aim of the Cross-Disciplinary Seed Funds is to allow faculty to act on these ideas and make them realities.

Every year I look forward to seeing the creative applications and the exciting research and findings these collaborations produce.”

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For McLaughlin and Saavedra, their new research project will allow them to carve out a new direction for approaching the increasing demand for land and water resources that are necessary to feed the growing global population. By combining Saavedra’s proven ecological theories with McLaughlin’s experience studying the optimization of resources, the pair are taking a new direction towards ecological diversity and food production.

“Questions that are relevant to this project are issues of land use in areas with high biological diversity that are fragile ecosystems, but that are attractive, at least superficially, for agricultural development,” McLaughlin said. “We’ve got this growing global population that is pushing food demand, so there’s a demand for more food, but it’s not clear where it’s going to be grown, except places where the local ecosystem might have to be greatly changed.”

Previous research on food production has considered factors such as climate, water, and soil. McLaughlin and Saavedra are adding factors of ecological and landscape diversity, including resource competition among plants and the ecosystem’s tolerance to environmental stresses, to this list of considerations. Through their newly launched project, the pair are attempting to identify the effects of plant diversity and plot scale on crop productivity and resilience. Using this information, they are aiming to create a model for allocating land and water resources in environments where ecological factors, such as biodiversity and environmental stress, are present.

“We are trying to combine our research into an ‘eco-optimization model’ that optimizes production, but at the same time takes into account the ecological implications of this growth. These two things cannot be separated, but so far they have been treated separately,” Saavedra explained.

The project, which has its genesis in a thesis project by one of McLaughlin’s graduate students, uses Hawaii as its case study. CEE faculty and students have been pursuing various research projects in Hawaii, including air quality sensing and plant health on farms, during the department’s Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences

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(TREX) program. McLaughlin and Saavedra’s project offers a new potential topic of research for TREX students in upcoming years.

The project will also be useful as supplementary case studies for Saavedra’s course 1.s977 (Modeling Community Diversity) and McLaughlin’s course 1.74 (Land, Water, Food, and Climate).

The other project funded by this year’s CEE Seed Fund award is being spearheaded by Cohen, who specializes in nonlinear solid mechanics and material instabilities, and Cordero, a microbiologist who studies micro-scale ecology.

By combining forces, the pair are initiating a project to understand how bacteria colonize and decompose complex biological materials, a process that is crucial to the global carbon cycle.

Materials such as plant fibers can only be broken down by microorganisms that release extracellular enzymes capable dissolving complex biopolymer networks. This breakdown of polymers releases into the environment considerable amounts of carbon, which are otherwise sequestered inside the biological material.

This decomposition of plant fibers fragments, which occurs in soils, oceans or animal guts, drives the carbon cycle of the planet. This process, however, depends on the interplay between mechanical instabilities that emerge within the plant tissue and the ecology of microbes growing on the surface of the material. Such interplay between physics and ecology has never been studied thus far, and it is unclear to what extent the speed of degradation depends on this relationship.

To address this issue, Cohen and Cordero are seeking to integrate mathematical models and experiments, creating a multidisciplinary approach to tackle this question.

To fully understand how biopolymers are decomposed by bacteria, Cordero’s lab is creating a micro-scale model ecosystem to understand how the individual bacteria break down a controlled hydrogel, representing the biopolymer.

An understanding of a single particle will provide insight into the fundamental principles that govern the global function of microbial ecosystems.

“It was clear to us that there were biological and

ecological problems that were directly interfacing with physics. Some of this physics we can take care of in our lab, but once it starts to get to the physics of the materials and why they break and the forces at play, it becomes much more complicated. And that was actually something Tal was working on in different contexts,” Cordero said.

Thus, Cohen’s lab is creating a theoretical model to describe the mechanics of polymer surface growth and degradation such as the ones in Cordero’s controlled setting. The theoretical models of the system will then be applied to the model system developed by the Cordero lab to get a complete understanding of the process from both a biological and mechanical perspective.

Simultaneously, Cohen’s lab is creating a theoretical model to describe the mechanics of polymer surface growth and degradation, such as the ones seen in Cordero’s controlled setting.

The theoretical models of the system will then be applied to the model system developed by the Cordero lab to get a complete understanding of the process from both a biological and mechanical perspective.

Together, the two labs plan to develop a mathematical model integrating the mechanical approach with biological observations.

“I think it would be super exciting if we find something that shows a non-trivial interaction between the physics and biology determining how fast those things can break up,” Cordero said. With a fundamental understanding of how the degradation process works using his model ecosystem and Cohen’s theories, Cordero notes that the model could potentially be used for more complex organisms.

“For me, primarily being a theoretician, anytime I get this opportunity to work with people who are working on ideas that are very different from the types of problems I’ve been working on, but I can apply the same tools to it, is a super exciting opportunity,” Cohen said.

The project stems from a conversation between graduate students from Cohen’s lab and

Cordero’s lab at CEE’s annual Research Speed Dating event, and the students will be integral to the theoretical and experimental components of the research project.

“I think [the collaboration is] a great opportunity for students in the sense that they get acquainted with a different community and a different type of thinking. We tend to have these disciplines that think about problems in very specific ways but it’s very fruitful to talk and kind of cross-pollinate,” Cohen said.

Now in its fourth year, the Cross-Disciplinary Seed Funds support one graduate student from each of the selected projects for one year. The student is chosen by the faculty members to receive the funding, and will be subsequently mentored by both faculty members. This unique style of project also allows the graduate student to receive a wider perception of the project at hand. Selected projects also demonstrate the potential for a long-term collaboration beyond the one year of department funding.

CEE faculty often collaborate to create multifaceted, comprehensive solutions to a variety of issues and to solve major problems.

Researchers in CEE also partner with other departments, labs and centers at MIT and at other institutions, including universities, governmental organizations, and industry practitioners, to further the potential impact of their work and applying their work to other domains.

“In order to do good research, you have to collaborate with the experts in those fields.

These days, science is not done by a single person, it has two or more people involved, so definitely that helps a lot,” Saavedra said. “There are many things that you don’t see because you’re so biased by your own expertise, that once you start explaining things to people that are not necessarily experts or see the world in a different way, that is hugely interesting and beneficial, not only for the project but also for your work.”

This article was written for MIT News by Carolyn Schmitt of CEE Communications.

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In the Department

Professors Otto Cordero and Roman Stocker host kickoff meeting for newly launched Simons Foundation collaboration

Assistant Professor Otto Cordero and Visiting Associate Professor Roman Stocker hosted a group of researchers at MIT for the first meeting of the Simons Foundation collaboration “Theory of Microbial Ecosystems� (THE-ME). THE-ME aims to understand basic principles and laws of microbial ecosystems.

Read More

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Simons Foundation funds alliance between CEE and EAPS

The Darwin Project, an alliance between oceanographers and microbiologists in CEE and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), received funding from the Simons Foundation to expand computing resources to model microbial communities. The funding will also provide support for the Chisholm Lab to use larger metagenomic libraries.

Read More

Concrete Sustainability Hub travels to New Brunswick to investigate durability of concrete in Mactaquac Dam

This summer, members of the Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) traveled to New Brunswick, Canada to get a firsthand look at concrete durability issues at the Mactaquac Dam. CSHub is collaborating with researchers from the University of New Brunswick and Oregon State University to pursue a multi-faceted research project into the multiple durability issues that affect concrete, include one that affects the dam.

CSHub is studying an alkali-silica chemical reaction, using computational methods to get a complete understanding of the reaction, which is known to cause cracking and structural problems that are slowly expanding the dam.

Read More 32

MIT students fortify concrete by adding recycled plastic

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Adding bits of irradiated plastic water bottles could cut cement industry’s carbon emissions.

Discarded plastic bottles could one day be used to build stronger, more flexible concrete structures, from sidewalks and street barriers, to buildings and bridges, according to a new study.

MIT undergraduate students have found that, by exposing plastic flakes to small, harmless doses of gamma radiation, then pulverizing the flakes into a fine powder, they can mix the irradiated plastic with cement paste and fly ash to produce concrete that is up to 15 percent stronger than conventional concrete.

Concrete is, after water, the second most widely used material on the planet. The manufacturing of concrete generates about 4.5 percent of the world’s human-induced carbon dioxide emissions.

Replacing even a small portion of concrete with irradiated plastic could thus help reduce the cement industry’s global carbon footprint.

Reusing plastics as concrete additives could also redirect old water and soda bottles, the bulk of which would otherwise end up in a landfill.

“There is a huge amount of plastic that is landfilled every year,” says Michael Short, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “Our technology takes plastic out of the landfill, locks it up in concrete, and also uses less cement to make the concrete, which makes fewer carbon dioxide emissions. This has the potential to pull plastic landfill waste out of the landfill and into buildings, where it could actually help to make them stronger.”

The team includes Carolyn Schaefer ’17 and MIT senior Michael Ortega, who initiated the research as a class project; Kunal Kupwade-Patil, a research scientist in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Anne White, an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering; Oral Büyüköztürk, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Carmen Soriano of Argonne National Laboratory; and Short. The new paper appears in the journal Waste Management.

“This is a part of our dedicated effort in our laboratory for involving undergraduates in outstanding research experiences dealing with innovations in search of new, better concrete materials with a diverse class of additives of different chemistries,” says Büyüköztürk, who is the director of Laboratory for Infrastructure Science and Sustainability. “The findings from this undergraduate student project open a new arena in the search for solutions to sustainable infrastructure.”

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An idea, crystallized Schaefer and Ortega began to explore the possibility of plastic-reinforced concrete as part of 22.033 (Nuclear Systems Design Project), in which students were asked to pick their own project.

“They wanted to find ways to lower carbon dioxide emissions that weren’t just, ‘let’s build nuclear reactors,’” Short says.

“Concrete production is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide, and they got to thinking, ‘how could we attack that?’ They looked through the literature, and then an idea crystallized.”

The students learned that others have tried to introduce plastic into cement mixtures, but the plastic weakened the resulting concrete.

Investigating further, they found evidence that exposing plastic to doses of gamma radiation makes the material’s crystalline structure change in a way that the plastic becomes stronger, stiffer, and tougher.

Would irradiating plastic actually work to strengthen concrete?

To answer that question, the students first obtained flakes of polyethylene terephthalate — plastic material used to make water and soda bottles — from a local recycling facility. Schaefer and Ortega manually sorted through the flakes to remove bits of metal and other debris. They then walked the plastic samples down to the basement of MIT’s Building 8, which houses a cobalt-60 irradiator that emits gamma rays, a radiation source that is typically used commercially to decontaminate food.

“There’s no residual radioactivity from this type of irradiation,” Short says. “If you stuck something in a reactor and irradiated it with neutrons, it would come out radioactive. But gamma rays are a different kind of radiation that, under most circumstances, leave no

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trace of radiation.”

The team exposed various batches of flakes to either a low or high dose of gamma rays.

They then ground each batch of flakes into a powder and mixed the powders with a series of cement paste samples, each with traditional Portland cement powder and one of two common mineral additives: fly ash (a byproduct of coal combustion) and silica fume (a byproduct of silicon production).

Each sample contained about 1.5 percent irradiated plastic.

Once the samples were mixed with water, the researchers poured the mixtures into cylindrical molds, allowed them to cure, removed the molds, and subjected the resulting concrete cylinders to compression tests. They measured the strength of each sample and compared it with similar samples made with regular, nonirradiated plastic, as well as with samples containing no plastic at all.

They found that, in general, samples with regular plastic were weaker than those without any plastic. The concrete with fly ash or silica fume was stronger than concrete made with just Portland cement. And the presence of irradiated plastic along with fly ash strengthened the concrete even further, increasing its strength by up to 15 percent compared with samples made just with Portland cement, particularly in samples with high-dose irradiated plastic.

The concrete road ahead After the compression tests, the researchers went one step further, using various imaging techniques to examine the samples for clues as to why irradiated plastic yielded stronger concrete.

The team took their samples to Argonne National Laboratory and the Center for

Materials Science and Engineering (CMSE) at MIT, where they analyzed them using X-ray diffraction, backscattered electron microscopy, and X-ray microtomography. The high-resolution images revealed that samples containing irradiated plastic, particularly at high doses, exhibited crystalline structures with more cross-linking, or molecular connections. In these samples, the crystalline structure also seemed to block pores within concrete, making the samples more dense and therefore stronger.

“At a nano-level, this irradiated plastic affects the crystallinity of concrete,” KupwadePatil says. “The irradiated plastic has some reactivity, and when it mixes with Portland cement and fly ash, all three together give the magic formula, and you get stronger concrete.”

“We have observed that within the parameters of our test program, the higher the irradiated dose, the higher the strength of concrete, so further research is needed to tailor the mixture and optimize the process with irradiation for the most effective results,” Kupwade-Patil says. “The method has the potential to achieve sustainable solutions with improved performance for both structural and nonstructural applications.”

Going forward, the team is planning to experiment with different types of plastics, along with various doses of gamma radiation, to determine their effects on concrete.

For now, they have found that substituting about 1.5 percent of concrete with irradiated plastic can significantly improve its strength.

While that may seem like a small fraction, Short says, implemented on a global scale, replacing even that amount of concrete could have a significant impact.

“Concrete produces about 4.5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions,” Short says. “Take out 1.5 percent of that, and you’re

already talking about 0.0675 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. That’s a huge amount of greenhouse gases in one fell swoop.”

“This research is a perfect example of interdisciplinary multiteam work toward creative solutions, and represents a model educational experience,” Büyüköztürk says.

This story has been updated to clarify that concrete containing both irradiated plastic and fly ash, rather than with irradiated plastic alone, is stronger, by up to 15 percent, compared to conventional concrete.

This article was written for MIT News by Jennifer Chu of the MIT News Office.

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Alumni Updates

CEE alumnus Kerry Bowie ’94 MBA ’06 offers advice for current students CEE alumnus Kerry Bowie ’94 MBA ’06 was profiled by Global Education and Career Development (GECD) as part of their Infinite Careers Alumni Profile series. The feature discusses Bowie’s career and Read More includes a Q&A with Bowie about networking, his time at MIT, and other fun facts.

MIT Alumni Shares His Experience at CEE New Research Reception

After attending the CEE New Research Reception on October 26, Alejandro Barrios Tellez SM ‘82 shared his experience at the event on LinkedIn. Barrios Tellez highlighted the research of the four professors who Read More presented and provided his insight on the state of the department.

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CEE alumna Karina Funk SM ’97 profiled on Forbes CEE alumna Karina Funk SM ’97 was profiled on Forbes for her work as a Portfolio Manager/Head of Sustainable Investing at Brown Advisory. The article discusses Funk’s personal story and the criteria she uses to evaluate investments.

Read More

Alumna Manxi Wu receives Centers’ Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award from Council of University Transportation Centers

Manxi Wu MST ’17 was selected as a winner for the Council of University Transportation Centers’ Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award. The annual award is given by CUTC for the best Master’s thesis in the field of science and technology in transportation studies. Wu is currently a doctoral student in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).

Keep in touch with us!

A new initiative is underway to profile CEE alumni and educate prospective CEE students about the wide

range of careers available to CEE alumni. CEE alumni are encouraged to share their accomplishments to be highlighted online and in future newsletters. Email one@mit.edu with any updates!

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Research for global needs, present and future

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New Research Reception gives alumni and the community an inside look at research and initiatives in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

As the world’s most pressing challenges in infrastructure and environment evolve, so do the research areas and specialties of MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) faculty to meet these needs.

To keep alumni and community members informed of the current research and initiatives in the department, CEE held its annual New Research Reception on Oct. 26. Featuring an update on the status of the department and presentations on new research developments from four distinguished faculty members, the event highlighted the global contributions of CEE research and provided a glimpse into the imminent impact to come.

“There’s nothing better than having alumni come back to MIT and see the light and sparkle in their eyes. It reminds me of the time when they were students; some of the alumni here tonight I met when they were students,” said Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and head of CEE, during the opening remarks.

Buehler gave an overview of the department, including recent additions to the faculty and updates on the undergraduate and graduate programs and community initiatives. He also spoke about the department’s the unique fieldwork programs: Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences (TREX) and Materials in Art, Archaeology and Architecture (ONE-MA3), which ta ske students to Hawaii for environmental research and Italy for infrastructure and materials research, respectively.

“In CEE it’s important to see the world as our classroom, and TREX and ONE-MA3 bring our students out into the field to get firsthand research experience,” Buehler said. “We hope to build more of these kinds of activities, because there’s nothing better than actually seeing and touching and experiencing what infrastructure and the environment really looks like.”

Following a networking hour, four faculty members gave brief overviews of their current and ongoing research, and fielded questions about their work.

Professor Oral Buyukozturk began his research presentation by highlighting examples of major structural failures that have occurred around the world. He explained how his research seeks to study and prevent such occurrences through innovative, sustainable materials and an understanding of the mechanics and design of structures.

Sustainability is a driving factor for Buyukozturk’s research. The production of concrete contributes up to six percent of the world’s carbon dioxide, he said, and one of the goals of his research is to design materials that have low embodied energy and emit lower carbon dioxide.

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“It can be done; the Romans did it more than 2,000 years ago. But they did not use the concrete we are using today. They used local materials; they looked at the local materials to try to come up with the best solution,” Buyukozturk said. “The Romans were able to generate structures that last 2,000 years, but that’s basically through trial and error. Now we’re in the age of science, and we need to go through a more scientific approach.”

For this new approach, Buyukozturk and his group start by analyzing the atoms and molecules that make up different cementitious-based construction materials for use in infrastructures.

In his overview of recent research in his group, Buyukozturk spoke of the creation of a computer model that simulates the behavior of atomistic level building blocks under a variety of conditions and related this to the macroscopic mechanical behavior showing how the strength develops in concrete materials. The study is expected to open a new era in engineering new materials and structures.

In addition, Buyukozturk showed examples of dynamic identification and quantification of structural systems including bridges from remote video camera measurements using motion magnification, a new development and innovation of his group.

He also gave an introduction to a newly launched large scale project related to the City of Groningen in the Netherlands. For this project, Buyukozturk and his team are studying why earthquakes continue to occur after local oil drilling ceased.

The ultimate goal of the project is to predict potential damage to local infrastructure from these earthquakes.

Institute Professor Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, most well-known for her role in discovering Prochlorococcus, the smallest, most abundant photosynthetic cell, spoke about the significance of the cell on the global carbon cycle. She explained that half of photosynthesis on earth occurs in oceans and bodies of water, and Prochlorococcus, the smallest of all phytoplankton, is collectively responsible for 10 percent of that, making it a significant player in the global carbon cycle.

Since Prochlorococcus was discovered in the 41

mid-1980s, Chisholm and her lab have made a number of critical discoveries about the cell. While each cell has on average 200 genes, they each contain flexible genes that vary from cell to cell based on the environment. It is estimated that, collectively, there are more than 80,000 different genes in Prochlorococcus in the world’s oceans, four times the genetic information in a human being.

“I think of the ocean as dissolved information,” Chisholm said. “There’s this information in microbes and it’s moving around, so one question is, how it is it moving around?”

By studying the flexible genes, Chisholm’s lab found that the genes can be identified as coming from different species. The lab analyzed vesicles on the Prochlorococcus cell and found that they contain DNA, RNA, proteins and lipids, and thus could be one of the ways in which DNA is being mixed around and moving from species to species and contributing to the flexible gene pool, Chisholm said.

Chisholm also spoke about recent developments in her lab, including research from Rogier Braakman, a postdoc in her lab, and that of Professor Mick Follows of CEE and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Braakman found that the evolution of Prochlorococcus could provide insight into the evolution of more complex marine ecosystems.

Following her presentation, Chisholm was asked about Prochlorococcus’ response to pollution in oceans, to which she explained that it is found in relatively pristine open ocean ecosystems and is particularly sensitive to trace metals, making it difficult to bring the cell into the lab and recreate its environment.

Next, Assistant Professor Tal Cohen, who specializes in nonlinear solid mechanics and material instabilities, gave an outline of her research and her newly established Nonlinear Solid Mechanics Group. Cohen began her presentation by talking about the trend towards the use of highly deformable materials in engineering, such as flexible phones and wearable sensors.

“It seems in recent years that our ability to perform very precise experiments, computations,

and fabrication techniques has advanced tremendously, but we still have a ways to go in understanding and making sense of all of the data that we are producing,” Cohen said.

During her talk, entitled “Mechanics of Squishy Things,” Cohen described her interest in understanding how material instabilities form and how materials grow. She discussed how understanding surface growth, a natural process seen in nature, can potentially be translated to engineering applications. Material growth is only one of the focuses of her research group; her group also looks at material instabilities and extreme dynamic loading conditions, and how these three concepts interact.

Cohen concluded her presentation with an overview of the classes she is teaching this semester, including 1.058 (Structural Dynamics) and 1.101 (Civil and Environmental Engineering Design I).

“It’s a super exciting experience because [in 1.101] we’re essentially teaching students to invent. We’re putting them in a space where they think about what inspires them in civil and environmental engineering, and we take them through a design process to come to a final product. We try to go outside and to look at what’s going on around campus and how can we improve things on campus using engineering tools.”

Lastly, H.M. King Bhumibol Professor Dennis McLaughlin spoke to the group about sustainable options for food security. He stressed the challenge of meeting global food demand with a rising population, especially in areas of East Africa.

“I got interested in food security primarily through its connection with water, because I’m a hydrologist. Most of the water that humans are involved with goes to agriculture,” McLaughlin said at the beginning of his talk. “We have a tendency to take food security for granted and to assume that since our needs are met now they will be met in the future. And yet things are changing very rapidly as the food and resource needs of people in developing countries increase dramatically.

Many of the changes are not felt so much by people in this room, who can import all the food

they need, but are important for people who are not as well-off.”

During his presentation, McLaughlin touched upon the primary options for increased food production: expanding cropland; increasing yield through techniques such as irrigation, genetic modifications, and precision agriculture; and better allocation of existing resources. He noted that cropland expansion and yield increases can have adverse environmental impacts that could restrict their effectiveness. More efficient allocation of land, water, and nutrients to both subsistence and cash crops could have great potential for meeting future food needs in the developing world.

“One of the things you don’t want to do is expand agriculture in a way that is unsustainable because it stresses or depletes natural resources. It would be very useful to know the carrying capacity of agricultural systems from local to global scales.

This is the maximum production we can expect with current technology and available resources.

Improved understanding of resource limitations could help us identify the best places to grow particular crops and suggest strategies for more efficient and sustainable production,” McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin and his students are currently using optimization techniques to investigate more efficient and sustainable resource use in India, China, and Africa.

“The diverse research in CEE at MIT adapts to the world’s needs and seeks to find innovative solutions to these challenges,” Buehler said. “It is always great to reconnect with our alumni, to share our developments and achievements with them, to show them what our current students and researchers are doing to address major global challenges, and to gather useful feedback and new problems to collaborate on.”

This article was written for MIT News by Carolyn Schmitt of CEE Communications.

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Looking Forward

January 26: MIT Ecology 2018 Mitsui Chair Professor Serguei Saavedra and Professor Jeff Gore of the Department of Physics are co-

organizing the second MIT Ecology Meeting, a biennial event that strives to bring together faculty, postdocs, and students doing ecology research in the Boston area and beyond. The event will be held on January 26, 2018, and the theme for this year’s meeting is mathematical ecology. Students and postdocs are invited to present their work through short presentations.

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Register Here

July 16-20, 2018: IASS 2018 In July 2018, the annual Symposium of the IASS – International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures – will be held at MIT. The symposium unites designers and researchers working in the fields of structural

engineering and architecture from around the world. The symposium theme is Creativity in Structural Design and is being organized by CEE Professors John Ochsendorf and Caitlin Mueller.

Learn More

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Civil and Environmental Engineering

Interested in receiving this publication in print? Contact one@mit.edu Massachusetts Institute of Technology I Department of Civil and Envrionmental Engineering 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 1-290 Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 I (617) 253-7101