USING AI AND COMMUNITY-SOURCED VIDEO TO MODEL FIREBRAND SPREAD AND STRENGTHEN RESILIENCE
AI-POWERED NAVIGATION AND SHARED-CONTROL SYSTEMS THAT EXPAND MOBILITY AND INDEPENDENCE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ACCEPTS ITS FIRST RESEARCH GRANT PAID IN STABLECOIN, POWERING BLOCKCHAIN TOKENIZATION OF INFRASTRUCTURE
THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
JORDAN B. ACKER, Huntington Woods
MICHAEL J. BEHM, Grand Blanc
MARK J. BERNSTEIN, Ann Arbor
PAUL W. BROWN, Ann Arbor
SARAH HUBBARD, Okemos
DENISE ILITCH, Bingham Farms
CARL MEYERS, Dearborn
KATHERINE E. WHITE, Ann Arbor
DOMENICO GRASSO (ex officio)
LETTER FROM THE CHAIR
This past year has been shaped by extraordinary challenges, from natural disasters and human-made crises to a shifting political and funding landscape. These events underscore the urgency of resilient solutions, making the theme of this year’s magazine, Building Resilience, especially timely and fitting.
As global issues and changes in funding impact cities and research, the University of Michigan Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering remains committed to resilience through ongoing innovation. I hope this issue conveys that, even amid uncertainty, our faculty and students continue to drive discoveries that serve communities worldwide.
We are preparing to face emergencies and hazards head-on, applying resilient design principles informed by past disasters to better plan for risks and prevent future damage. With expertise spanning from wildfires, floods, earthquakes and cybersecurity, our faculty make this department uniquely equipped to lead in risk management and resilience.
Alongside resilience, automation and circularity are equally central to our vision. Together, these three themes guide our work and define our strategic directions. Automation leverages AI and robotics to create smart, responsive technologies; circularity focuses on valuing waste byproducts, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting resource renewal. United under our initiative in Automation, Resilience and Circularity (ARC), these themes reinforce one another and position our department to advance a sustainable, technologically-advanced future.
We are also committed to supporting our international students, many of whom have faced significant visa-related challenges. Some prospective students have had to defer enrollment, while current students, at times, must decline valuable travel and research opportunities to maintain their visa status. We remain dedicated to helping them navigate these obstacles and ensuring their continued contributions to our community.
This year, we are pleased to welcome alumnus Domenico Grasso (Environmental Engineering PhD ‘87) as interim president of the University of Michigan and professor of civil and environmental engineering. We warmly embrace his return and look forward to the leadership, experience and insights he brings to our department.
Looking ahead, I am encouraged by our department’s persistence and innovative spirit. By strategically meeting the toughest engineering and societal challenges, we are not only enduring but also building resilience
Wheelchair Automation Advancing Mobility and Independence with AI-Powered Navigation and Shared Control Systems
Yafeng Yin, Ph.D.
Donald
Cleveland Collegiate Professor of Engineering
Donald Malloure Department Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
226 Undergraduate Students
88 Master’s Students
109 PhD Students
9:1
49 Faculty Members Student to Faculty Ratio Years as a Department
WHAT IS RESILIENCE?
WHAT IS RESILIENCE?
Resilience is not only preventing hazards but also manipulating and controlling their impact. In order to truly prevent tragedy resulting from these disasters, we need to learn from the tragedies of the past.”
-Assistant Professor Estéfan Garcia
Resilience is typically defined as the ability of infrastructure to withstand storms, earthquakes or other disasters, but engineers at U-M CEE are proving that design is about much more than survival. Using resilience as a deeply embedded principle that guides every decision, innovation and partnership, CEE engineers are developing systems that allow communities to adapt, recover and emerge stronger on the other side of an emergency.
By approaching engineering with people-first design, our engineers are finding out what a community needs to evolve after a disaster and discovering new ways to foster thriving, healthy societies in the face of both predictable and unprecedented challenges.
That vision guides U-M CEE faculty as they lead research and outreach around the world, using cutting-edge technology and interdisciplinary expertise to redefine and expand society’s understanding of what resilient engineering truly means.
The following stories provide a glimpse into the many ways CEE researchers are shaping the future of resilience, from remote Himalayan villages to wildfire-prone neighborhoods, from urban mobility networks to the digital front lines of cyber defense.
PEOPLE-CENTERED DESIGN IN NEPAL
Assistant Professor Sabine Loos has devoted her research to working with high-risk communities in countries like Nepal, where communities have adapted and developed their own resilience to the threat of landslides, monsoon floods and earthquakes.
Loos comes up with creative methods of collecting data with communities to support their resilience. Collaborating with organizations on the ground and drawing from her experiences in both engineering and social science, Loos designs systems that fit local needs. These solutions range from developing community-based hurricane insurance mechanisms to national-scale landslide accessibility maps.
“I work with civic technology organizations to approach things from a more human-centered design perspective. We talk to potential users, like community members, planners or insurance companies, to understand what is actually needed and then develop a model or approach that best fits these needs,” she explains.
These efforts may involve strategically combining flood sensors, crowd-sourced reporting, satellite images and mobile phone surveys. “Sometimes the information we need does not exist in any one place or format,” she notes. “We have to find methods that people can use easily and that respond to their actual daily risks.” By putting people at the center and not just the technology, Loos helps to build not only disaster warning systems, but trust and local ownership, which are essential for true resilience.
CEE graduate students and collaborators operate a drone in Nepal’s Chitwan Valley
STORY BY ANDREW HOUSMAN & MASON HINAWI
WILDFIRES AND HARMONIOUS HUMAN HABITATS
Physical resilience in buildings and infrastructure is undeniably important, but Associate Professor Ann Jeffers reminds us that human communities are just as critical to withstand and recover from natural disasters. With wildfire incidents becoming more frequent and intense, her research focuses on the often-overlooked connections between structural engineering, land management and social responsibility.
“When we talk about resilience in the wildland urban interface, it has to be on the community scale,” she points out. “What I do on my property affects what my neighbors experience. We cannot just look at what individual homeowners do.”
Jeffers studies how neighborhoods built at the edge of wild landscapes are uniquely vulnerable, yet have opportunities to cooperate for mutual benefit. She advocates for a more harmonious relationship between human activities and the cycles of fire in certain environments. Rather than returning to the status quo after a disaster, she hopes to see communities learn from each fire event and adapt their designs and planning strategies.
“There are communities living in places where the wildfire risk is unknown.
We really need to work hard to prepare those communities and to help them adapt to the hazard that is pending,” she adds. This work requires not only advances in fire-resistant materials and smarter land-use policies, but a cultural willingness to change how communities interact with the landscapes that surround them.
SPATIAL DATA AND MOBILITY
Emergencies disrupt the routines of daily life, but Professor Seth Guikema’s research shows that the path to resilience involves far more than simply counting damaged buildings. To him, the heart of resilience is ensuring that after a disaster, people can regain access to essential resources with as little delay as possible.
“To me, resilience is about people being able to get access to what they need to have access to in order to go
I work with civic technology organizations to approach things from a more humancentered design perspective. We talk to people like community members, users, planners or insurance companies to see what is actually needed and then develop some type of model that best fits what they need.”
Wildfire spreads across a mountainside
-Assistant Professor Sabine Loos
Wildfire damage in Los Angeles, California
Around the world, emergencies disrupt the routines of daily
about some semblance of a normal life as quickly as possible,” says Guikema. “So resilience is reducing the initial impact of a community-wide disruption, restoring access when it is interrupted and helping communities adapt and be better prepared for future disruptions.”
Guikema applies powerful spatial data analytics to map community vulnerability and identify the ripple effects of disruptions across a region. By using anonymous cell phone data, he can learn how long it takes for critical services such as urgent care clinics, grocery stores, pharmacies and even schools to reopen after a disaster. His analyses also show how quickly people can return to their homes and jobs, and whether certain neighborhoods can recover faster than others.
“We use all sorts of data to figure out how disruptions affect different scales, from city infrastructure down to individual households. It is important because not every part of a community will experience the same impact and not everyone recovers in the same way,” he says.
Guikema emphasizes that resilience must include social factors and not just physical structures. “It is not just about the building or the power system or the transportation system, but also about community needs, policy and health aspects. It is a very interdisciplinary problem,” he explains. By bringing together engineers, urban planners, policymakers and social scientists, Guikema’s approach reveals hidden vulnerabilities and strengths, helping communities prepare for and bounce back from future challenges.
CYBERSECURITY SAFEGUARDS
As cities grow more dependent on complex digital networks, resilience must account for both the physical and the cyber worlds. Associate Professor Neda Masoud is leading research at U-M CEE to protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats, an area of growing concern as cities and transportation networks depend on automated technologies interconnected with each other through a digital web.
“As human involvement becomes increasingly limited, it is all the more important to ensure resilience against any form of cyber attack,” Masoud cautions. Hackers might target anything from self-driving vehicles to power grids, and a serious breach could quickly ripple outward to impact entire communities.
Protecting such complex systems is a multi-step process. “We must first detect an attack, identify which components of the system are affected and ultimately use the remaining healthy data to keep the system operating even while under attack,” Masoud explains. Masoud designs algorithms that can both withstand known vulnerabilities and adapt to “zero-day” attacks, referring to exploits that have never been encountered before. The goal is to help engineers anticipate what potential attackers might do and design systems resilient enough to function even under disruptive conditions. As infrastructure becomes increasingly dependent on automation and digital controls, these resilience strategies are becoming a vital part of civil engineering.
As we make the human intervention or presence more and more limited, it becomes more and more important to make sure that you are more resilient to any sort of cyber attack.”
-Associate Professor Neda Masoud
FLOOD MODELS FOR THE FUTURE
The increase in frequency and severity of floods due to climate change presents new and unpredictable threats, but Associate Professor Jeremy Bricker believes that learning from the disasters of the past is key to creating more resilient designs that prepare for those to come.
“My research focuses on predicting damage on flood walls, dikes, dams, seawalls and other types of flood control infrastructure and then developing guidelines for making these structures less vulnerable to storm surges and tsunamis,” Bricker says.
He conducts laboratory experiments and fluid dynamics computer simulations, but also collects and analyzes measured data from largescale, real-world flood events. However, climate change has complicated the task. “These studies assume a statistically stationary climate. Climate change raises the question of how we are going to re-quantify risks and the resiliency of neighborhoods,” Bricker notes.
To address this challenge, Bricker is bringing together information from the past with computer models built for the future. By working closely with climate scientists, he can run simulations that blend actual past events with projections for changing rainfall, sea level and storm patterns. In doing so, he and his colleagues are developing resources that will help engineers and policymakers protect communities across the world for the decades, centuries and millennia ahead.
ANTICIPATING EARTHQUAKES
Earthquakes are among the most unpredictable and potentially catastrophic natural events, especially for communities built near active faults that can break through to the ground surface. Assistant Professor Estéfan Garcia specializes in geotechnical engineering, investigating how the ground beneath our feet can be designed to absorb and redirect surface ruptures produced by earthquakes.
“We cannot control the occurrence of earthquakes, but we can engineer how the ground responds to them,” Garcia explains. When faults break through soil and rock to reach the ground surface in a phenomenon called surface fault rupture, the rupture tends to deflect away from stronger regions and toward weaker regions. This phenomenon includes ruptures deflecting away from heavy foundations and redirecting toward weaker regions in soil. Garcia’s research explores solutions for redirecting surface fault rupture away from critical infrastructure by purposefully engineering sacrificial weak zones in soil, which attract and diffuse damaging surface ruptures that could otherwise critically damage structures.
Even when a building does not entirely collapse from surface fault rupture, small displacements can compromise the long-term integrity of the building. By spreading out the displacement caused by an earthquake’s surface fault rupture, Garcia’s work
helps to prevent strains in the ground from translating into structural failure above. “These are ways in which we can save lives while also keeping infrastructure functioning,” says Garcia.
Growing up in the Bay Area of California, Garcia is no stranger to earthquakes. His interest in their hazards inspired him to get involved with post-earthquake reconnaissance missions around the world, including those for the 2021 Nippes, Haiti earthquake and the 2022 Chihshang, Taiwan earthquake. He is committed to making sure we learn as much as we can from earthquake damage so we can learn valuable lessons that can save lives in the future. “Some hazards cannot be prevented. So resilience to me is more about reducing their impacts to acceptable levels for lifesafety and functionality. What we can prevent is the tragedy resulting from these disasters, but to do that, we need to learn from the tragedies of the past,” Garcia says.
It’s not just about the building or the power system or the transportation system, but also about community needs, policy and health aspects. It’s a very interdisciplinary sort of problem.”
CONCLUSION
Resilience is the thread that ties together every challenge and every solution within the U-M Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Our faculty use resilience as a central guiding principle to design not only systems that anticipate and withstand environmental stressors, but also policies, tools and strategies that protect communities and ecosystems both near and far.
From community-centered flood warning systems in rural Nepal to nextgeneration cybersecurity protocols in automated vehicles, from the science of earthquake mitigation to the realities of climate-driven disasters, the concept of resilience powers innovation and hope. Our faculty are united in helping communities recognize environmental change, adapt to extreme events and build a safer, more sustainable future.
Resilience at U-M CEE is not simply about withstanding the next disaster. It is about ensuring that communities and infrastructure recover, adapt and grow stronger to face whatever new challenges the future may bring.
-Professor Seth Guikema
Researchers at U-M CEE study earthquake fault lines
Earthquake damage can provide insights to learn valuable lessons
SUSTAINABLE CEMENT:
STORY BY PATRICIA DELACEY
Cement production is the secondlargest industrial contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, but its carbon footprint could be dramatically reduced with a new low-cost, scalable approach developed at U-M CEE. The approach could neutralize the most carbon-heavy step in cement production without changing the manufacturing process, according to a study recently published in Energy & Environmental Science. While traditional cement production gets its necessary calcium carbonate from limestone that releases carbon dioxide when heated in a kiln, U-M CEE researchers can make the calcium carbonate through an electrochemical process that captures CO2 from the air and binds it with abundant minerals or recycled concrete.
“Our newly developed electrochemical material manufacturing approach opens a new area in cement production and waste upcycling at scale,” said Jiaqi Li, U-M CEE Assistant Professor, former Staff Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and corresponding author of the study.
Production of cement—the world’s most used commodity behind water— currently produces 8% of global CO 2 emissions. Demand for this versatile building material, used to make concrete and mortar, is projected to increase by 50% as the world continues to urbanize.
Ordinary Portland cement, the most common form, is made by heating crushed limestone and clay together in a large rotary kiln. Heating the kilns using fossil fuels contributes 40% of the process’s CO2 emissions. The other 60% results from heat breaking down the limestone—a sedimentary rock mostly made of calcium carbonate (CaCO3)— into calcium oxide (CaO) and CO2
The U-M CEE approach, which replaces naturally occurring limestone with electrochemically produced calcium carbonate, neutralizes the CO2 released during kiln processing with the CO2 taken up from the air during electrochemical production.
If implemented at full capacity, this new strategy could reduce global CO 2 emissions by at least three billion metric
An electrochemical process to help neutralize cement industry CO2 emissions
tons—also known as three gigatons—a year. For scale, 37.4 gigatons of energyrelated global CO2 emissions were reported in 2023. The 8% of global CO2 emissions that cement production contributes today could be reduced to 3% or even further to net-zero with carbon capture.
“The strategy can change the cement industry from a gigaton CO2 emitter to a gigaton-scale enabler for clean energy and carbon management technologies,” said Wenxin Zhang, a doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology, graduate research intern at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and contributing author of the study.
The process works by applying an electric field across water containing a neutral electrolyte salt in an electrolyzer—a device with a positive electrode (anode) at one end and a negative electrode (cathode) at the other and a cation exchange membrane in the middle.
As electricity flows, water at the anode splits into oxygen gas (O 2) and positively charged protons (H+) while water at the cathode produces hydrogen gas (H 2 ) releasing negatively charged hydroxide ions (OH–). This process creates increasingly acidic anodic electrolytes and alkaline cathodic electrolytes that is harnessed to process calcium silicates.
Protons break apart the calcium silicate to form solid silica (SiO 2) and calcium ions (Ca2+). The calcium ions react
with CO2 from the air and hydroxide ions in the water to form solid, carbon-negative calcium carbonate.
While the calcium carbonate is the main product that will feed cement kilns, the solid silica can be blended into cement as a supplementary material to improve concrete or mortar strength and durability. The gases can even be put to use, with hydrogen gas as a green fuel and oxy-fuel for facilitating carbon capture and storage from flue gas.
Going a step further, U-M CEE researchers assessed whether the technology is economically viable, taking carbon credit savings into account. The electrochemical approach proved lowercost and more efficient compared to existing techniques.
“As the present strategy requires minimal or no modification to the cement plants, the new technology has low entry barriers so it can be adopted by large cement businesses,” said Xiao Kun Lu, a doctoral student of chemical engineering at Northwestern University and lead author of the study.
This research was a collaborative effort between U-M CEE, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Northwestern University and the California Institute of Technology.
NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS FOR STORMWATER RESILIENCE
STORY BY MASON HINAWI
With a project supported by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, U-M CEE Professor Glen Daigger in collaboration with faculty from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning seeks to further mitigate issues of stormwater flooding and to also enhance biodiversity in Southeast Michigan.
Historic stormwater design criteria in Southeast Michigan make managing issues of flooding a difficult task. However, under this grant, the U-M team aims to combine nature-based solutions, such as wetlands or the restoration of historic streams, to advance development of a practical regional plan for stormwater flood mitigation that offers many social and environmental benefits, including better flood protection, safeguarding wildlife and creating new habitats.
“You can’t address a problem like this with just pipes,” said project PI Glen Daigger. “You have to use large-scale natural systems.”
While the project utilizes a wide variety of stormwater solutions, project leaders will be seeking a variety of voices
and perspectives throughout the process as well, connecting with community leaders, regional and local governments and non-government organizations, to create a strong network of thinkers and collaborators to advance nature-based solution implementation.
“The better we understand what people value and what concerns they have, the better we can formulate projects that align with their objectives,” said Daigger.
The stormwater management effort features collaborators from not only within U-M but beyond it—researchers from Wayne State University’s Healthy Urban Waters Program, Michigan State University and the environmental engineering firm LimnoTech Inc. serve as co-leads on the project. Numerous collaborators help to achieve the project’s interdisciplinary goals, such as their commitment to addressing environmental injustices and helping Southeastern Michigan residents reap potential economic benefits as well as environmental ones.
“As you’re mitigating flooding, there
are multiple benefits, some of which can be directly monetized,” Daigger explained. “For example, flood mitigation lowers insurance rates for people and businesses. These broader economic benefits can eventually turn into local, state or federal support for projects like these.”
With this planning grant, Daigger and his collaborators have the opportunity to not only resolve current issues in stormwater flooding but create resilience within these Southeast Michigan communities and environments. By implementing natural solutions to stormwater flooding, the team aims to mitigate future problems before they even begin to form.
“Striking a good balance of these natural systems with traditional infrastructure dramatically improves the resilience of the system and its ability to deal with unusual weather events,” Daigger explained. “Natural systems can respond to these events and return to their natural functions very easily. That’s what resilience means in practice.”
YOU CAN’T ADDRESS A PROBLEM LIKE THIS WITH PIPES, YOU HAVE TO USE LARGE SCALE NATURAL SYSTEMS.”
-Professor Glen Daigger, U-M CEE
CONSTRUCTING AI FROM THE GROUND
STORY BY MASON HINAWI
In a world where data and technology are reshaping every aspect of engineering, U-M CEE is working to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into its undergraduate curriculum. Through enhanced coursework, early exposure and hands-on experience, the department is preparing students to become people-centered engineers ready to lead in an increasingly AIdriven world.
CEE’s two undergraduate programs— B.S. in Civil Engineering and B.S. in Environmental Engineering—now feature coursework designed to build AI literacy from the ground up. This includes expanded AI content in courses such as CEE 303: Computational Methods for Engineers and Scientists, CEE 373: Statistical Methods for Data Analysis and Uncertainty Modeling and CEE 375: Sensors and Data Acquisition.
“AI is no longer a buzzword—it’s an essential tool for solving modern infrastructure challenges,” said Jason McCormick, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and associate department chair of undergraduate programs. “We’re integrating AI in a way that aligns with our mission: giving students a peoplecentered education rooted in real-world impact. The goal isn’t just technical literacy; it’s equipping students to be adaptive, ethical and forward-thinking engineers.”
In CEE 375, students engage directly with sensors and field instrumentation, learning how to collect, process and make sense of complex datasets—skills that are foundational for AI applications in civil and environmental systems.
“A lot of learning happens when students see how AI integrates with their CEE domain knowledge. Data isn’t clean or convenient; it reflects the complexity of real environments, real infrastructure and real needs,” said Branko Kerkez, Arthur F. Thurnau professor and associate department chair of research. “We guide students through that full arc—from collecting data with sensors to modeling and interpretation—so they develop not just technological skills, but AI judgment in the context of their broader CEE training.”
At the same time, CEE 303 introduces students to Python programming and computational thinking, helping them develop the coding fluency necessary for advanced AI and machine learning tools.
BRANKO KERKEZ
JASON McCORMICK
AI LITERACY GROUND UP
“Python is the new baseline,” said Jeff Scruggs, professor and associate department chair of graduate programs. “When students come in with a strong coding foundation, it opens the door to deeper, more creative problem-solving. We’re seeing them apply these skills in capstones, internships and even research settings.”
Upper-level electives continue this path. One such course, CEE 554: Machine Learning for Infrastructure Systems, equips students with essential machine learning techniques to analyze
complex data, enabling the development of smarter, more resilient infrastructure. Open to graduate students and senior undergraduates, the course integrates theoretical foundations with real-world case studies to prepare future engineers to lead in data-driven innovation and adapt civil infrastructure systems to evolving societal challenges.
“In civil and environmental engineering, we’ve traditionally relied on models built on simplifying assumptions. But in practice, those assumptions don’t always hold. In this course, students get a firsthand glimpse into how systems actually
behave by working with real data,” said Neda Masoud, associate professor and course instructor. “They learn to base their designs on what the data is telling them, not just what the models say; so they can build solutions that are more robust, flexible and grounded in reality.”
The department is also exploring the creation of a new course that would precede the mathematical methods sequence. This course would provide students with an introduction to Python, AI fundamentals, ethical AI use and applications of generative AI, ensuring a common knowledge base and enabling AI integration across the curriculum.
“By making AI literacy part of our foundation, we’re not just preparing students for future jobs,” McCormick added. “We’re empowering them to shape what the future of civil and environmental engineering looks like.”
As the field continues to evolve, CEE reaffirms its commitment to offering an impactful education that combines deep technical expertise with human-centered design, ensuring that graduates leave with the skills, mindset and ethical grounding to lead in an AI-driven future.
NEW: APPLICATIONS OPEN FOR FIRST FULLY ONLINE CEM MASTER’S DEGREE
U-M CEE is now accepting applications for its first fully online degree, the Master of Engineering in Construction Engineering and Management (CEM). The program is offered by the department and administered through Michigan Engineering Online Professional Education (ME-OPE).
Launching in fall 2026, the 26-credit, coursework-only program is designed for professionals working in or aspiring to join the construction and infrastructure industries. The curriculum emphasizes project planning
and control, construction finance, risk modeling, contract management and emerging technologies for sustainable construction.
Students can complete the program full time in as little as two semesters or part time over the course of up to five years while working. The online format offers flexibility without compromise. The degree awarded is identical to the on-campus M.Eng., with no distinction in diploma or transcript.
Applicants may also begin with a six-course online certificate in CEM. If admitted into the master’s program,
those credits apply toward the degree and reduce the remaining requirement to 20 credits.
By expanding access to its topranked programs, U-M CEE aims to prepare the next generation of leaders in construction to build more efficient, resilient and sustainable infrastructure. Applications are open now.
NEDA MASOUD
JEFF SCRUGGS
U-M CEE Faculty First-of-Its-Host Kind Electric – Water ResilienceUtility Summit
STORY BY JIM LYNCH
Stronger collaboration has the potential to build resilience in Southeast Michigan and to position the region as a national leader and model in crossorganizational cooperation.”
-Professor Seth Guikema, U-M CEE
Water and electricity providers face a growing list of concerns—from changing weather patterns to aging infrastructure— and addressing those effectively will require a new level of cooperation between utilities.
The U-M CEE co-hosted a first-ofits-kind summit for utility operators, government officials and academic researchers on February 13-14, 2025, to foster cooperation in the region. Seth Guikema, professor of civil and environmental engineering, said the event was a first step in pulling together a strategic plan for regional resilience.
“Stronger collaboration has the potential to build resilience in Southeast Michigan and to position the region as a national leader and model in crossorganizational cooperation,” he said.
Guikema and other leaders indicated an interest in repeating the gathering in the coming years to help make that happen.
“We absolutely need, not just a handshake or a good conversation or a meeting once in a while, but we need to be deeply partnered,” said Suzanne Coffey, chief executive officer of the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA), before taking the stage on day one. “This is an opportunity for us to begin a deeper partnership with our utility brands.”
From the start, common ground was not hard to find. Both electric and water utilities are increasingly threatened by weather events that used to be oncein-a-century occurrences. In the past 25 years alone, Michigan has endured the Northeast blackout of 2003, Metro
Detroit’s historic flooding in August 2014 that caused $1.8 billion in damages, and a host of extended blackouts where hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses went without power for days.
The problems posed by these weather changes can look different for each utility.
“We track wind speeds and wind gusts across 21 different weather stations throughout our territory and have for years,” said Gregory Salisbury, Consumers Energy’s vice president of electric distribution engineering. “Since 2004, the amount of wind every year reaching severe and damaging levels has been going up… It’s two to three times more damaging than what our system was designed for or what it used to withstand just 20 years ago.”
Shifting weather patterns are meeting developing usage trends, further challenging utilities in new ways. On day one, utility officials identified several of those, including: increased electrification of just about everything, decarbonization efforts and the increasing energy demand of AI. “We’ve got to build a system that performs differently in much different weather,” Salisbury said. “Think of it as trying to hit a moving target from a moving platform because the assets are always changing—trees are always growing and the weather’s changing—but customer demands are also changing.”
Extreme weather events are an increasing issue for Coffey and GLWA as well. But those events are exacerbated by another factor—age. GLWA moves drinking water and wastewater for 3.9 million people in 8 counties, through 5 treatment plants and nearly 800 miles of pipelines. Much of that infrastructure has been in place for generations.
“Our infrastructure is aged up,” Coffey told the summit audience. “We think about the useful life of pipes being 75 to 100 years, and the average age of our pipes is 75 years.“So what does that mean to us? We’re going to have more and more pipe breaks.” Regional collaboration is often hindered by lack of a common language for utilities. “In our industry, there’s no standard measure for ‘resilience,’” said Satvir Deol, director of distribution operations central engineering at DTE Energy. “It’s great to have events like this so we can reach across [industries]…to understand how they measure resilience, and what they do.”
Suzanne Coffey, chief executive officer of the Great Lakes Water Authority
Transitioning to more resilient utility systems is challenging, not only in terms of logistics and funding, but in fairness as well.
“When we meet with communities on our system that are more fragile or disadvantaged, they’re not telling us to move faster on issues like decarbonization,” Salisbury said. “They say, ‘Our power was out so long that the food in our refrigerator spoils, and we can’t afford to replace it.’”
“I think we need to bring resilience into the conversation about a just transition, and we’re going to have to do both.”
U-M has often served as a middle ground for industry, government and research/academia in areas of high public interest, such as transportation and mobility.
“Here at U-M, we pride ourselves on being a premier public research university committed to interdisciplinary excellence and addressing the world’s most pressing challenges,” said Karen A. Thole, the Robert J. Vlasic dean of engineering at U-M, during opening remarks at the summit. “But we know we can’t do it alone.
“…You all represent the key infrastructure providers from Michigan and, more than anyone, you understand these needs and concerns of Michiganders
relating to storms, flooding, pipe breaks and other hazards. And we’re excited that you’re here to collaborate on creating regional resilience.”
U-M CEE along with the Center for Risk Analysis Informed Decisions Engineering, hosted the event. Roughly 160 participants registered, representing electricity providers like DTE, ITC Holdings and Consumers Energy, and water providers like GLWA and the Southeast Oakland County Water Authority, and consultants from across the Midwest.
Cities sending officials included Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, Sterling Heights and Harper Woods, while the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments and Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy sent representatives as well.
Here at U-M, we pride ourselves on being a premier public research university committed to interdisciplinary excellence and addressing the world’s most pressing challenges.”
-Karen A. Thole, the Robert J. Vlasic dean of engineering
Gregory Salisbury, Consumers Energy’s vice president of electric distribution engineering, speaks during the utility resilience conference
Karen A. Thole, the Robert J. Vlasic dean of engineering at U-M, speaks during the utility resilience conference on February 13
Satvir Deol, director of distribution operations central engineering at DTE Energy, speaks during the utility resilience conference on February 13
U-M CEE ENGINEERS PIONEER AUTOMATION FOR WHEELCHAIR USERS
STORY BY JIM LYNCH
Autonomous technologies promise passengers travel without concern—the ability to get from Point A to Point B without needing to be engaged in the process. Yet passengers still don’t trust computers the way they trust human drivers, and most autonomous vehicles on the road today are equipped for a human to take over.
The same technologies that allow autonomous vehicles (AVs) to navigate city streets can also give motorized wheelchair users the ability to get from place to place without personally controlling the chair, but wheelchair users also want a way to override the computer. Engineers at U-M CEE aim to provide that functionality.
Most wheelchairs available to those needing regular transportation are either fully manual, or fully autonomous—with
few options in between. The research team is harnessing the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors and an onboard camera to allow people with disabilities the combination of freedom to let the software drive and oversight when the user is less trusting of autonomous decisions.
“The sweet spot is something we call ‘shared control’ or ‘shared autonomy,’ where the robot is assisting you to the extent you want, but it is not ever putting the passenger in a situation where they cannot control their destiny,” said Vineet Kamat, the U-M John L. Tishman Family professor of construction management and sustainability and a professor of civil and environmental engineering.
“People with physical disabilities primarily want to maintain their independence but have significant navigation and maneuvering challenges
operating in the built environment.”
In many instances, the prospect of having to steer through a complex or crowded pathway may discourage people with disabilities from partaking in social, business or educational opportunities.
In the U.S., roughly 2.7 million per year experience health issues that require the use of a wheelchair.
Kamat and Carol Menassa, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and a John L. Tishman construction management faculty scholar, have collaborated for years, helping robots to understand and reason with built environments, both indoors and outdoors. This year, their research team was able to outfit a motorized wheelchair with both LiDAR and a 3D camera, tap into the wheelchair’s drive system and write algorithms that would allow for shared
Trust is very important in this type of situation, because there are so many things at stake”
-Professor
Carol Menassa, U-M CEE
Watch
the research video: control with the help of a video game controller.
“Trust is very important in this type of situation, because there are so many things at stake,” Menassa said. “You want to trust that you are going to be safe and that any people in the environment are going to be safe.” It’s the same problem being encountered by the auto industry. In October 2023, J.D. Power reported: “Consumer confidence in fullyautomated, self-driving vehicles continues to decline for the second consecutive year… Consumers show less readiness on all metrics, with the lowest level of comfort riding in a fully automated, self-driving vehicle and using fully automated, selfdriving public transit.”
They have been testing their system, called CoNav, in the basement corridors of the G.G. Brown Building on North Campus with able-bodied volunteers manning the chair.
“Feedback between the user and the system is very important,” Menassa said, “and that is the feedback that’s going to, over time, initiate or establish that trust.”
The research team includes: Yifan Xu, a U-M graduate student research assistant, Jordan Lillie, a U-M biomedical engineering technician and undergraduate student Qianwei Wang.
Following the technical validation and testing that’s currently underway, the team will turn its focus to testing with people with disabilities.
Q&A: How U-M CEE is Leading in Automation, Resilience and Circularity
Civil and environmental engineers are increasingly called upon to tackle interrelated challenges across both the built and natural environments. From intensifying climate risks and rapid urbanization to biodiversity loss and resource depletion, the world demands integrated solutions that span infrastructure, ecosystems and communities. U-M CEE stands at the center of this moment, launching an ambitious campaign that responds directly to this global shift and positions us to lead the transformation of how society interacts with the environment.
Yafeng Yin, Donald Malloure department chair of civil and environmental engineering and Donald
Cleveland collegiate professor of engineering, shared with us the vision behind this initiative, the resources that fuel it and how the broader community can help define a new era for civil and environmental engineering.
Q: What motivated the department to focus on automation, resilience and circularity as your central themes?
Yafeng Yin: Our department’s strategic plan identifies transformative opportunities to elevate the discipline and redefine the profession of civil and environmental engineering. This forwardlooking vision is anchored in five strategic priorities: Improving Human Habitat Experience, Shaping Resource Flows, Adaptation, Automation and Data-Driven
Innovation. Together, these priorities reflect our commitment to addressing society’s most pressing challenges through innovative, people-centered engineering.
We recently distilled these strategic priorities into three core themes: automation, resilience and circularity. These themes were deliberately chosen to reflect both urgent needs and generational opportunities in the built and natural environment. They also align with our department’s exceptional strengths in faculty expertise, state-of-the-art facilities and strategic partnerships. Our goal is to convey a clear and compelling message: these are not only globally significant challenges, but also areas
STORY BY YAFENG YIN & MASON HINAWI
YAFENG YIN
in which our department is uniquely positioned to lead.
By focusing on automation, resilience and circularity, we are redefining civil and environmental engineering and preparing the next generation to tackle the most complex challenges of the 21st century with innovation, systems thinking and sustainability at the core.
Q: How is the department uniquely equipped to advance these three pillars?
Yafeng Yin: Our department is uniquely positioned to lead in automation, resilience and circularity through the combination of strong faculty who are internationally recognized leaders across these areas, state-of-the-art research facilities and robust partnerships with industry and the public sector. We house specialized laboratories for construction robotics, infrastructure sensing, resilient materials and environmental biotechnology, and benefit from Mcity, a world-class proving ground for connected and automated vehicle testing. We also operate one of the most advanced real-time water infrastructure labs in the world, led by Professor Branko Kerkez, which uses dense networks of smart sensors and actuators across Southeast Michigan to monitor and manage urban water flows in real time. These facilities provide living laboratories that enable both fundamental research and real-world innovation.
Our impact is further strengthened through strategic partnerships with leading utilities and agencies, including the Great Lakes Water Authority, Consumers Energy, DTE Energy and numerous state and national transportation agencies. These collaborations accelerate the deployment of new technologies, ensure the rapid translation of research into practice and keep our work closely aligned with society’s most pressing infrastructure and environmental challenges. Together, this ecosystem empowers our department to both advance fundamental science and deliver practical, transformative solutions for the future.
Q: Can you share examples of projects that show the impact of these themes?
Yafeng Yin: Across all three themes, our faculty are delivering innovations that are reshaping the future of civil and environmental engineering. In automation, researchers are advancing autonomous vehicles, connected mobility systems, smart water infrastructure, self-powered structural control systems and robotics for construction and maintenance. These innovations are redefining how infrastructure operates, intelligently, adaptively and autonomously.
In resilience, our expertise spans
hazard modeling, risk analysis and structural response to extreme events. Faculty lead groundbreaking work on resilient infrastructure systems, humancentered disaster information platforms and mitigation strategies for hazards such as wildfires, tsunamis, floods, windstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, landslides and cyber threats. This comprehensive approach enables us to engineer systems that can withstand shocks and adapt to growing uncertainty.
In circularity, our faculty are developing new ways to reuse water, recover energy and nutrients from waste streams and create carbon-neutral and carbon-negative materials. For example, researchers are designing recyclable composite materials, converting urine into fertilizer and advancing anaerobic membrane bioreactors for energy-positive wastewater treatment. Other efforts focus on repurposing mine tailings and industrial byproducts as inputs for cement and concrete, enhancing both sustainability and structural performance.
Q: What are your long-term goals for this campaign, and how can alumni or industry partners get involved?
Yafeng Yin: The overarching goal of this campaign is to share our vision with the broader community and raise awareness of the opportunities and challenges that define the future of civil and environmental engineering. At the core of our vision is the belief that the profession’s future lies in understanding and shaping the complex systems that connect people, the built and natural environments and digital infrastructure. Our campaign seeks to highlight the urgent challenges and generational opportunities in automation, resilience and circularity, while attracting new investments to expand research initiatives, recruit outstanding faculty and launch educational programs aligned with our strategic priorities.
We invite alumni and industry partners to join us in this effort. Alumni can support by mentoring students, promoting our work through their professional networks and contributing to innovation funds and departmental initiatives. Industry partners can play a vital role by sponsoring collaborative research, offering pilot sites for new technologies, co-developing workforce training programs and shaping research agendas with practical, highimpact outcomes. Together, we can accelerate the transformation of civil and environmental engineering into a profession that is more intelligent, resilient and sustainable—and better equipped to meet the complex challenges
of the 21st century.
Q: How does your focus align with global trends and the most urgent engineering needs?
Yafeng Yin: Civil and environmental engineering is increasingly shaped by global challenges such as climate change, rapid urbanization, biodiversity loss and resource scarcity. Addressing these interconnected issues requires new ways of thinking that combine technology, sustainability and resilience. By focusing on automation, resilience and circularity, we align our work with these global trends and equip engineers to deliver solutions that are not only efficient, but also adaptable and sustainable.
Automation brings powerful tools like AI, robotics and digital twins that allow us to better monitor, design and manage infrastructure and ecosystems in real time. Resilience ensures that communities and systems can withstand and recover from shocks such as floods, wildfires and supply chain disruptions. Circularity promotes regenerative design, reducing waste, reusing resources and restoring ecosystems. Together, these priorities prepare our department to lead in shaping the future of civil and environmental engineering, advancing both human development and environmental health.
By embracing automation, resilience and circularity, U-M CEE is not only pushing the boundaries of our discipline but also providing a blueprint for a more sustainable and innovative future.
To learn more or to get involved, connect with the department through our alumni network, explore partnership opportunities or visit our website for details on current research and programs.
U-M CEE ENGINEERS USING AI TO DECODE LOS ANGELES WILDFIRES
In January 2025, wildfires swept through Los Angeles, igniting a crisis that once again underscored the vulnerability of communities at the wildland-urban interface: the zone where human development meets undeveloped wildland vegetation. As billions of dollars in losses mounted and thousands of homes succumbed to the flames, University of Michigan civil and environmental engineers led by Associate Professor Ann Jeffers launched a research initiative to uncover how such disasters unfold and how communities might become more resilient against them.
“Our interest in wildfires comes from the fact that they’re a growing problem, both in the U.S. and abroad,” says Professor Jeffers. “Fires have ecological benefits. They help certain plants regenerate and control invasive species, but when they come into contact with communities, it becomes a serious issue.” The challenge isn’t just the inexorable march of flames; rather, a significant culprit is the tiny embers, or firebrands, that spin off blazing vegetation and travel in swirling winds. These embers are adept at sneaking through attic vents or igniting flammable materials next to houses, often setting structures alight far away from the head of the fire.
In collaboration with Associate Professor Seymour Spence and Assistant Professor Estéfan Garcia, Jeffers’ group is now in the third year of developing
computational models that trace exactly how embers move and ignite homes.
“We’re combining a high-fidelity model using the Discrete Element Method, which is more common in geotechnical engineering, to simulate how embers bounce, roll and gather at the base of homes, with a more computationally efficient method for capturing ember transport at the city or neighborhood scale. It’s an unusual pairing, but embers, at the end of the day, are just burning particles moving through the air and across surfaces,” says Jeffers.
The Los Angeles fires brought unprecedented urgency and a rare research opportunity. Video footage captured by professional teams and residents with cell phones flooded social media as the fires raged, especially in neighborhoods like Altadena that received late evacuation notices. “We realized that these videos could provide invaluable data. Nighttime shots showed embers glowing and swirling in the wind. There was uncertainty at first—would the footage be good enough? Would people share it? But through collaboration with Ralph Bloomers, who filmed a PBS documentary on the fires, crowd-sourced clips from the community and support from the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, we amassed a significant collection,” says Jeffers.
Transforming cell phone videos into scientific insight isn’t straightforward. “People recording during a wildfire are moving, so the footage is short, and
often chaotic. Most useful videos are at night, when embers are visible, but that introduces its challenges,” Jeffers notes.
The team employs machine learning techniques to stabilize video, detect glowing embers frame by frame and extract meaningful data about ember speed, trajectories and density. “We’re also mapping each video to its specific location and correlating it with weather and wind field data. The big picture is empirically linking how wind, fuel type and landscape features affect how embers move and where they ignite structures,” she adds.
Practical applications are on the horizon. Rather than providing real-time warnings—residents can already see fires approaching mountains—the aim is to quantify the true hazard intensity communities face. “A lot of testing for building materials is based on streams of embers, but nobody knows if those test conditions reflect reality. Some footage from the LA fires showed palm trees shedding thousands, possibly millions, of embers at once—in ways that standardized test setups probably don’t capture.” By understanding the true scale and intensity of ember showers, communities and policymakers can make more informed decisions about retrofitting homes, managing vegetation and investing in infrastructure. “If I have a finite budget, should I invest in new roofs, siding or thinning out nearby forests? Our models can help communities decide where interventions will have the greatest impact,” says Jeffers.
STORY BY MASON HINAWI
Wildfire resilience needs a culture shift: finding ways to live with fire, recognizing its role in the ecosystem and keeping the destructive fires at bay.”
-Associate
Professor Ann Jeffers, U-M CEE
The research focuses on communityscale solutions; wildfires are a collective problem. “What one homeowner does with their property and landscaping affects their entire neighborhood,” Jeffers says. “Approaches like Zone 0, where no combustible material is allowed within five feet of a home, are known to be effective. But the biggest gains come when everyone participates and communities prioritize resilience together.” Los Angeles, with its distinctive vegetation like chaparral and palm trees, serves as a unique case study for ember production. Still, Jeffers sees potential in applying these methods anywhere fires are a threat. “Ring cameras, doorbell
videos and cellphones are everywhere now. Analyzing this ‘messy’ data could transform how we understand fire dynamics in real-life events, not just controlled laboratory experiments.”
Beyond the technical, the project is also deeply attuned to the human side. “There’s a huge trauma component to wildfire, people fighting to save their homes, sometimes with nothing more than a garden hose, and communities picking up the pieces after massive loss,” notes Jeffers, who brings her perspective as a survivor of mass trauma. Resilience, to her, is as much about proactive maintenance and adaptation as it is about rebuilding. “It’s managing
the hazards—through land and vegetation management, smarter home design— and continuously learning every time a fire occurs. Wildfire resilience needs a culture shift: finding ways to live with fire, recognizing its role in the ecosystem and keeping the destructive fires at bay.”
The work at U-M CEE, bridging highfidelity modeling, artificial intelligence and grassroots data gathering, is a pioneering example of what’s possible when science and community come together. Translating digital fragments from disaster into actionable knowledge aims to help neighbors nationwide build back smarter, safer and stronger.
GRANT PAID IN CRYPTOCURRENCY IS A FIRST FOR U-M: A Q&A WITH PETER ADRIAENS
STORY BY JIM LYNCH
U-M CEE is accepting its first grant paid in cryptocurrency, coincidentally, for its continuing work in the blockchain/ crypto field.
In 2019, U-M was selected as one of 26 universities to join the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI)—a program funded by Ripple, one of the first fintech firms. Ripple was started by a team that includes U-M alumni. It provides governments and financial institutions the means to “move, manage and tokenize” the value of their financial resources via Ripple’s ledger (XRPL) and its stablecoin cryptocurrency, RLUSD. Ripple became famous in 2012 by cutting time and cost for international money transfers.
Peter Adriaens, professor of civil and environmental engineering, discusses the project and the payment.
Q: A cryptocurrency payment supporting cryptocurrency research— how did this unique funding mechanism come about?
Peter Adriaens : Since 2019, U-M has received about $2 million for its work in the University Blockchain Research Initiative. This latest $200,000 installment is being paid out in Ripple’s new stablecoin cryptocurrency, RLUSD, which was launched last November.
A stablecoin should not be confused with the speculative memecoins or other cryptocurrencies, which are very volatile. RLUSD is a cryptocurrency designed to minimize price volatility by pegging its value to a stable asset, typically a fiat currency like the US dollar. It offers speed of transfer, lower transaction costs and is programmable to automate transactions between institutions or performance triggers.
This first grant to the university paid in cryptocurrency reflects and validates one of my research group’s main research themes: using blockchain and new financial instruments for real-world applications. It’s both a test case for university administration procedures and a model for potential future blockchainbased grant and payment systems. U-M’s wallet platform converts the stablecoin
to dollars upon receipt.
Q: Why is Ripple backing blockchain and crypto research with universities, and where has the work taken you?
Peter Adriaens: Few universities were engaged in this kind of research so Ripple founded UBRI as part of an effort by fintech companies to create an incentive for researchers to develop marketdriven use cases. Ripple’s UBRI funding helped us first build a community here by supporting a FinTech Collaboratory that linked the College of Engineering’s Center for Digital Asset Finance, the Ross School of Business’s FinTech Initiative and the Ford School of Public Policy’s Center on Finance, Law and Policy. Our Center for Digital Asset Finance, was the University’s lead principal investigator.
The Collaboratory led to increased involvement from engineering and business students, particularly those who were already running the Michigan Blockchain undergraduate club, which was conducting peer-to-peer learning sessions for students to code smart contracts, facilitating entrepreneurial business development and consulting with some of the largest fintech and DeFi (decentralized finance) companies in the US. For example, Michigan Blockchain students won the first International Blockchain Olympiad in Hong Kong in 2019 with Vivica, a tracking solution for cross-state opioid prescriptions, followed by several other successful submissions.
After that initial community building, we shifted our focus to applied research. In particular, we looked at potential uses for the cryptocurrency XRP and Ripple’s
blockchain ledger, XRPL, in infrastructure finance (CEE), unbanked communities (Ford) and hackathons for new business solutions (Ross).
Q: Ripple focuses on “tokenization,” in the financial sector. Your own work, since long before this project, has focused on tokenization of a different kind. Can you explain that research?
Peter Adriaens : At CEE, I have been focused on the tokenization of infrastructure financing—for example, tollroads, water utilities or ports. The scale is difficult to exaggerate: The municipal bond market is $4.4 trillion dollars, of which 70-80% is used for infrastructure financing. Municipal bonds built America. Coincidentally the first municipal bond was issued in 1817, the same year U-M was founded, to finance the Erie Canal, thus unlocking trade from the East Coast to the Great Lakes states.
In this context, tokenization refers to issuing municipal bonds or loans on a blockchain and breaking them into smaller, tradeable digital tokens.
That enables investors, not just large financial institutions but also individuals (retail investors), to invest in infrastructure and receive fixedincome (interest) returns. Blockchain tokenization of infrastructure bonds simplifies the transaction process by reducing the intermediaries such as law firms and credit agencies using code, called smart contracts. That also reduces the cost of financing infrastructure. Though not blockchain-based, as an analogy you can think of how Venmo has changed bank-based transactions of cash. No more transaction costs, no waiting time for checks to clear or paperwork to be filled out at the counter.
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PETER ADRIAENS
WOVEN METAMATERIALS INSPIRED BY BASKETS FOR STIFF, RESILIENT ROBOTS
STORY BY PATRICIA DELACEY
Drawing on the prehistoric art of basketweaving, engineers at U-M CEE found that woven materials return to their original shape after repeated cycles of strong compression, while continuous sheets of the same material permanently deform.
The modular platform to assemble woven corners presented in Physical Review Research could be used in any application where both resilience and stiffness are essential including soft robotics, car parts and architectural components.
After lead author Guowei Wayne Tu, a doctoral student of civil and environmental engineering at U-M, came across an article that dated woven baskets to around 7500 BCE, the researchers wondered if the ancient craft persists today for reasons beyond geometry and aesthetics.
“We knew weaving is an effective way of creating 3D shapes from ribbons like reed and bark, but we suspected there must also be underlying mechanical advantages,” said Evgueni Filipov, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and corresponding author of the study.
The study unearthed those mechanical advantages: high stiffness for load-bearing and resilience for longterm use.
“I’m very excited about harnessing the benefits of ancient basket weaving for modern 21st century engineering applications,” added Filipov. “For instance, lightweight woven materials for robotics would also help humans stay safer in case of human-robot collisions.”
To test mechanical properties, the research team assembled structures by weaving together Mylar polyester ribbons, about the width of a pinky finger and the thickness of two sheets of copy paper, arranged perpendicularly to one another. They formed this 2D weave into a 3D metamaterial—meaning a synthetic composite material with a structure that creates physical properties not found in natural materials.
“While modern metamaterials are often designed for electromagnetic, optical or acoustic properties, people have been making mechanical metamaterials through weaving and other structural approaches for millennia,” said Tu.
The structures used four different corner arrangements that brought together three, four, five and six planes. For comparison, the team assembled the same structures with continuous, unwoven Mylar. They then tested both types by progressively crushing them.
One pair of rectangular boxes standing 17 cm tall returned to their original shape after being compressed by one centimeter. When compressed more, the continuous structure was permanently damaged while the woven structure was unchanged even after being compressed by 14 cm to less than 20% of its original height.
High resolution 3D scans identified points on the continuous structure where concentrated stress caused the material to buckle and deform. The woven structure instead redistributes the stress across a wider area, preventing permanent damage.
Next, the research team investigated stiffness, measured by how much force is needed to compress structures from the top or bend them with a push on the side. They tested all four corner structures against continuous structures of the same Mylar polyester. Across all experiments, woven materials were 70% as stiff as their continuous counterparts— disproving the misconception that woven
systems are inherently flexible.
When testing more complex configurations, an L-shaped structure meant to resemble a robot arm supported 80 times its weight vertically—like holding a heavy bag at waist-level—and easily flexed upward, as a human arm would. A woven robot prototype with four legs that the researchers refer to as a dog held 25 times its weight and could still move its legs to walk. When overloaded, the woven dog robot returned to its original shape, able to hold the same weight again.
“With these few fundamental cornershaped modules, we can design and easily fabricate woven surfaces and structural systems that have complex spatial geometries and are both stiff and resilient. There is just so much more potential for how we could use these corner-based woven structures for future engineering design,” said Tu.
As one such application, the researchers designed a concept for a woven exoskeleton that adapts stiffness for different parts of the human body— allowing movement while providing reusable shock absorption.
“Going forward, we want to integrate active electronic materials into these woven structures so they can be ‘smart’ systems that can sense the external environment and morph their shapes in response to different application scenarios,” said Filipov.
The research was funded in part by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-22-1-0321).
FACULTY HONORS
Aline Cotel
·Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education (ADUE) Teaching Award
Greg Keoleian
·The International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) Society Prize
·Resources, Conservation & Recycling Advances Best Paper Award
Sabine Loos
·VI José María Sarriegi Scientific Divulgation Award
Gabor Orosz
·Best Paper Award, Automotive and Transportation TC, American Control Conference
·Best Paper Award, IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium
·Fulbright Scholarship, US Department of State
·Promotion to Professor
Sherif El-Tawil
·Moisseiff Award (ASCE)
Branko Kerkez
·Promotion to Professor
Lissa MacVean
·Raymond J. & Monica E. Schultz Outreach & Diversity Award
·Chapter Honor Member of the U-M Chapter of Chi Epsilon
·Rackham Graduate School Faculty Recognition Award
Vineet Kamat
·Tucker-Hasegawa Award
·Best Paper at ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering (i3CE)
SangHyun Lee
·National Academy of Construction Induction
·ASCE Fellow
·CEE Departmental Faculty Award
Carol C. Menassa
·Best Paper at ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering (i3CE)
Seymour Spence
·Best Paper at the International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability (ICOSSAR)
NEW FACULTY
U-M CEE WELCOMES PRESIDENT DOMENICO GRASSO TO OUR FACULTY
U-M President Domenico Grasso was officially appointed as a Professor with Tenure in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering on August 25, 2025.
Grasso, who earned his PhD in Environmental Engineering from our department in 1987, expressed excitement about rejoining CEE. “It gives me great pleasure to rejoin the department that was so instrumental in launching my career. Although I will not be returning in a traditional capacity, this appointment feels very much like a homecoming. I look forward to enhancing my connection with the CEE community and contributing in ways that support our shared commitment to excellence in engineering education and research,” he said.
Leadership at Michigan Engineering has celebrated Grasso’s appointment. “We are proud to have President Grasso join us, and I look forward to his continued collaborations with our academic community,” said Karen Thole, Robert J. Vlasic dean of engineering.
“A distinguished leader in higher education and an accomplished engineer, President Grasso brings a wealth of experience and insight that will undoubtedly enrich our department’s academic and scholarly endeavors,” said Donald Malloure department chair of civil and environmental engineering, Yafeng Yin. “President Grasso’s return to the department is especially meaningful. His career exemplifies the values we strive to instill in our students: excellence in scholarship, leadership in service and a deep commitment to advancing the public good through engineering.”
STAFF AWARDS
Stories by Mason Hinawi & Andrew Housman
The Judith A. Pitney Staff Service Career Award
Patricia Brainard, longtime CEE Unit Administrator, has received the College of Engineering’s highest staff honor: the Judith A. Pitney Staff Service Career Award. With 17 years of service, Brainard is recognized for her transformative leadership, dedication and impact on CEE and Michigan Engineering. She modernized departmental operations, championed diversity and inclusion and led initiatives such as cross-training systems and the “Creating Conversations” program. Brainard has also supported multiple departments, strengthened community and mentored staff. Her recognition reflects sustained excellence, innovation and inclusivity, echoing Judith Pitney’s legacy. She was honored at a College reception on May 21, 2025.
2025 CoE Staff Incentive Awards
Congratulations to CEE’s Janelle Cramer and Mark Kleersnyder, recipients of the 2025 College of Engineering (CoE) Staff Incentive Award, which honors staff who consistently embody the values of the college and the department. Since joining CEE in 2022, Janelle has strengthened relationships across faculty, staff and students, excelling in proposal submissions, reimbursements and complex purchasing needs. She was nominated for her problem-solving, collaboration and attention to detail. Mark, CEE’s IT specialist, was recognized for leadership, creativity and commitment, notably implementing a new hot desk system now used across CoE. Both exemplify excellence and dedication, making significant contributions to the CEE community.
2025 CEE Staff EXCELLENCE Award
Joyce Kennedy has received the 2025 CEE Staff Excellence Award for her outstanding dedication as Senior Administrative Assistant. She supports key committees, manages events, masters new systems and has processed over 550 orders this year alone—all with a can-do attitude and exceptional work ethic. As our M-Healthy Champion, Joyce leads by example, embodying wellness and flexibility while consistently going above and beyond. “I really enjoy working at CEE! It’s exciting to see the research our department is doing and know that I’m a part of that. I look forward to continuing to advance our mission together. I’ve placed over 550 OPS orders this year and roughly 2,000 over the past 4.5 years!”
NEW STAFF
Crista Deneau
Student Services Manager
Crista Deneau joined CEE on September 22, 2025. She has more than 12 years of experience in higher education, most recently with the College of Engineering’s Center for Entrepreneurship and the Ross School of Business. Crista earned her MA in Higher Education Administration from U-M in 2024 and a BFA in Photography from Wayne State University in 2010. She now leads the CEE Student Services team, working with Lynn Shock, Jackie Graniel and Shania Allen to support undergraduate and graduate students. Passionate about equity and student success, Crista is dedicated to creating meaningful experiences that help students thrive. Outside of work, she enjoys baking sourdough and canning salsa.
Kaelan Flint
Laboratory & IT Technician
Kaelan Flint joined CEE as a Lab & IT Technician on April 28, 2025. They hold a BS in Computer Engineering from Kettering University and bring eight years of experience as a software engineer in the automotive industry, specializing in embedded systems. Kaelan has also provided computer and network support to universities, businesses and home users. Originally from Flint, Michigan, they also consider Chicagoland a second home. In their free time, Kaelan enjoys painting, studying architecture, exploring new hobbies and walking their cat.
Oscar Sanchez-Martinez Jr. — Environmental Engineering BSE
Maryam Shafie Khorassani — Civil Engineering BSE
Olivia Sherman — Environmental Engineering BSE
Charles Smith — Environmental Engineering BSE
Samuel Spidel — Civil & Environmental Engineering BSE
Deon Stephens — Civil Engineering BSE
Koby Stewart — Civil Engineering BSE
Aaron Sugarman — Civil Engineering BSE
Claire Taylor — Civil Engineering BSE
Braedon Urzua — Civil Engineering BSE
Ayse Uzan — Civil Engineering BSE
Andrew Wohlford — Civil Engineering BSE
Evan Zalek — Environmental Engineering BSE
Jessica Zhang — Environmental Engineering BSE
Jacob Zhao — Environmental Engineering BSE
GRADUATE DEGREES
Masahiro Abe — Environmental Engineering PhD
Anwar Alsharaf — Civil Engineering MSE
Peter Arts — Environmental Engineering PhD
Abigail Atwood — Environmental Engineering MSE
Francis Baek — Civil Engineering PhD
Kristina Bonnet — Environmental Engineering MSE
Brittany Brown — Environmental Engineering PhD
Mackenna Burkholder — Civil Engineering MSE
Tyler Carlsgaard — Environmental Engineering MSE
Phillip Chacon — Environmental Engineering MSE
Cassandra Champagne — Civil Engineering PhD
Kshitij Chaudhary — Structural Engineering MEng
Spencer Checkoway — Environmental Engineering MSE
Morgan Comfort — Environmental Engineering MSE
Simone Curtis — Civil Engineering MSE
Travis Dantzer — Civil Engineering PhD
Debadrita Das — Civil Engineering MSE
Benjamin Davidson — Structural Engineering MEng
Xinyi Deng — Civil Engineering MSE
Aymeric Destree — Civil Engineering MSE
Anna Gossard — Environmental Engineering MSE
Rita Halphen — Civil Engineering MSE
Noah Hayter — Structural Engineering MEng
Ryan Herster — Civil Engineering MSE
Mary Hess — Environmental Engineering MSE
Emily Hong — Environmental Engineering MSE
Leina Kaehr — Civil Engineering MSE
Sakie Kawsar — Civil Engineering MSE
Vivian Kim — Civil Engineering MSE
Dianna Kitt — Environmental Engineering PhD
Maxwell Klein — Environmental Engineering MSE
Daehyun Ko — Environmental Engineering PhD
Taewhan Ko — Civil Engineering MSE
Kayla Leady — Structural Engineering MEng
Shuyang Li — Civil Engineering MSE
Siqi Lian — Civil Engineering MSE
Zhichen Liu — Civil Engineering PhD
Joseph Lybik — Environmental Engineering MSE
Zhenyu Ma — Environmental Engineering PhD
Jeffrey Manner — Environmental Engineering MSE
Riley McKenna — Environmental Engineering MSE
Haylee Miller — Environmental Engineering MSE
Kevin Murphy — Civil Engineering MSE
Benjamin Nelson-Mercer — Civil Engineering MSE
Marion Ni — Environmental Engineering MSE
Julien Nyberg — Environmental Engineering MSE
Karina Otten — Civil Engineering MSE
Alison Palmer — Civil Engineering MSE
Sravan Potturi — Civil Engineering MSE
Pedro Puente Alarcon — Environmental Engineering PhD
Jesus Ramirez Guillermo — Civil Engineering MSE
Emma Remien — Civil Engineering MSE
Letian Ren — Civil Engineering MSE
Hunter Richards — Environmental Engineering MSE
Gustav Rohde — Smart Infrastructure Finance MEng
Nicholas Said — Civil Engineering MSE
Morgan Saunders — Environmental Engineering MSE
Jonathan Shell — Civil Engineering MSE
Charalampos Sofios — Civil Engineering MSE
Stephanie Sparkowski — Civil Engineering MSE
Chenxin Su — Environmental Engineering MSE
Yining Sun — Environmental Engineering MSE
Meagan Tobias — Civil Engineering MSE
Anushka Tripathi — Civil Engineering MSE
Corin Tyler — Environmental Engineering MSE
Ziying Wang — Civil Engineering MSE
Theodore Wood — Environmental Engineering MSE
Junwon Yang — Environmental Engineering PhD
Brian Yeung — Environmental Engineering MSE
Keoni Young — Environmental Engineering MSE
Shiqi Zhang — Civil Engineering MSE
Xinran Zhang — Environmental Engineering MSE
Yiming Zhang — Environmental Engineering MSE
Yue Zhang — Environmental Engineering MSE
Lingyun Zhong — Civil Engineering MSE
Haojie Zhu — Civil Engineering PhD
Wenxing Zuo — Environmental Engineering MSE
Ethan Zurek — Civil Engineering MSE
STUDENT AWARDS
Khikmatullokh
Olutimilehin
STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS
Michigan Concrete Canoe Team
This year, the Michigan Concrete Canoe Team demonstrated resilience and innovation in the face of unexpected challenges. When our mold sponsor withdrew support at the last minute, we quickly pivoted to sourcing foam, learning CNC techniques and fabricating our own mold to ensure our canoe called OLYMPUS could still be built. Despite the disruption, we successfully competed at the regional conference hosted by Michigan Tech, earning fifth place overall.
Beyond the competition, we presented at CEE 200, Festifall and Winterfest, sharing our passion for engineering and design with students and faculty. We also held regular paddling practices and social events including barbecues, our annual paper plate awards and a “rules social” where members can paddle the concrete canoe.
Theme Park Engineering
Throughout the past year, Michigan TPED (formerly TPEG) spent time creating personal industry connections, becoming well-versed in the design/safety process and crafting experiences for the student body. To start the semester, we collaborated with the Center for Campus Involvement (CCI) to build a haunted house from the ground up with walls, effects and scare actors to make a fully immersive experience for over 350 students. In November, we sent a team of five students to the Toronto Metropolitan University Thrill Design Competition, where we received commendations for technology innovation, technical communication and creative technical design. During the winter semester, we were able to attend our first ASTM F24 Meeting on Amusement Rides and Devices, where we listened to committee meetings, provided input on safety standards and networked in the industry. We also competed in our first Ride Engineering Competition, where we designed and fully manufactured a ride model and drafted a report that included CAD models, engineering drawings and safety and service plans. This competition was hosted in collaboration with SITE at Ohio State University, where we heard from professional speakers who shared their industry experiences. We finished the year working with CCI to hold an interactive “iMessage Games Carnival,” in which students played iMessage games brought to life. We’re excited for another year of themed entertainment and can’t wait to get started.
Timber Strong Team
In 2025, we joined the ASCE Eastern Great Lakes Student Symposium for the first time, tackling the challenge of designing and constructing a two-story wood-framed building that was durable, sustainable and creative. Our team spent countless hours on calculations, design and construction planning, skills that reflect both our engineering education and our passion for innovation. The payoff was huge: we won second place overall and first in BIM modeling. We look forward to growing our team and returning stronger in 2026.
American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
The ASCE Student Chapter had a dynamic year of professional, social and service activities. We welcomed 11 companies to our weekly speaker series, hosted two social mixers with other CEE organizations and prepared members for the fall CEE Career Fair with a professional workshop. The fair itself, co-produced by ASCE, MiTSO and the ECRC, drew over 200 students to connect with 45 companies. Our members gave back through local park cleanups and our leadership board hosted a bridge-building activity for middle school students during a STEM exploration day. Trivia night and dinner meetings kept our community engaged throughout the year. In March, we capped things off with our annual Chicago Trip, where 48 students visited local offices, toured an active hospital construction site and enjoyed a banquet dinner that brought together 19 alumni and three professors for a panel and roundtable discussions. Continuing our previous focus on strengthening member involvement, we look forward to expanding participation while supporting students in developing skills and connections beyond the classroom in the upcoming year.
This past year was record-breaking for the Michigan Transportation Student Organization - MiTSO. Since its reinstatement two years ago, the ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineering) student chapter within MiTSO has expanded opportunities for students in transportation. In 2024, three members participated in the ITE Great Lakes District Meeting and Traffic Bowl. Focused on undergraduate engagement, MiTSO promoted transportation studies through class visits, school festivals and collaborations with Urban Planning. This academic year, MiTSO organized seven events, including two ITE-specific sessions featuring industry professionals like Madison Carlson (AECOM) and Sydney Wiseman (Fehr & Peers). Four more events are planned, including guest speakers and a Detroit field trip with ITE branding. Membership grew by 39 students with over 100 attendees at events. Notably, MiTSO supported 10 students (eight undergrads) attending TRB 2025, securing $18,000 in funding, the highest undergrad participation to date. Streamlined communications and bisemester mass meetings boosted engagement, averaging 20 attendees per session. Partnerships with MDOT, HNTB and local governments enriched student experiences through info sessions and field trips. Competitively, MiTSO’s team won the Transportation Technology Tournament at ITE’s international meeting and revived its Traffic Bowl participation. MiTSO remains committed to fostering transportation careers through academic, professional and mentorship opportunities.
Steel Bridge Team
The University of Michigan Steel Bridge Team continued its third straight year of beating Ohio State to finish on the podium at the ASCE Eastern Great Lakes Regional competition. After almost two semesters of designing, fabricating and constructing a 1:10 scale steel bridge, we took second place for the construction speed, cost estimate and economy categories and took third place overall. Our strong third-place finish at the regional level let us advance to the national level, paving the way to a very respectable fourth-place finish in the cost estimate category and an excellent overall performance. Behind the scenes, members of our team gained experience using structural analysis and 3D modeling software during the design phase and developed important fabrication skills, including welding, manual milling and laser cutting during the later phase of the project. Our members truly developed into well-rounded engineers who understand both conceptual design and physical manufacturing of complicated structures. This year, we made extensive use of the Wilson Student Team Project Center and are immensely grateful to the University of Michigan and its donors for making that available to us. You can find the University of Michigan Steel Bridge Team at numerous recruiting and outreach events across campus, including Festifall, Northfest and the Society of Women Engineers, as well as presentations in CEE 200 and at the Civil Engineering Open House. We plan to compete in the 2026 Eastern Great Lakes Regional Competition and continue to build our team and skills for years to come.
Chi Epsilon
Chi Epsilon is the national civil and environmental engineering honor society. Being inducted into this organization is a significant achievement and a valuable opportunity for our students. Our chapter brings together civil and environmental engineering faculty, students and alumni to foster a strong community focused on networking, academic excellence and professional development. During the 2024-25 academic year, we proudly inducted 15 new members into our chapter. We also welcomed a new chapter honor member, Professor Lissa MacVean, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the academic and professional advancement of the civil engineering field. Through our speaker events, our members explored topics such as air transportation, fluid mechanics and modern construction practices. In addition, we gave back to the local community through volunteer efforts with the Ann Arbor Natural Area Preservation and Willow Run Acres. This semester, our goal is to increase engagement among active members and extend outreach to students outside the chapter, helping to build a stronger sense of community within the CEE department. The executive board is excited to pursue these goals and provide a rewarding Chi Epsilon experience for both current and prospective members.
CEEFA PRESIDENT’S LETTER 2025
BY PAT WINGATE
Dear CEE Alumni, Students and Friends,
I hope everyone has enjoyed their summer and is ready for fall. Autumn is definitely in the air with school kicking off and all the activities that go with it, including Michigan football!
Our CEE department and the broader University of Michigan community continue to achieve remarkable milestones. Recent highlights include the expansion of the U-M battery laboratory, where researchers are developing cuttingedge technology to meet our growing energy demands. Our colleagues have also made headlines with the potential discovery of a new planet that may harbor water, and the department recently received the University’s first research grant funded through cryptocurrency.
In these times of environmental, economic and social challenges, the work of CEE graduates remains more vital than ever. Whether tackling complex global issues or addressing local community needs, our alumni are developing solutions that create meaningful change in communities worldwide.
I’m particularly proud to share that one of our own, Domenico Grasso (PhD ‘87), is now serving as interim president of the University of Michigan while also
joining our CEE faculty. This appointment exemplifies the leadership and impact our graduates continue to have across academia and beyond.
We are excited to kick off a new year on the CEE board and we thank outgoing Board Director Larry Brinker for his service, and welcome John Zaremski and Eric Ho to the board.
As the seasons change, I encourage you to embrace both the beauty of autumn and the exciting challenges ahead. If possible, I hope you’ll find time to return to campus—whether for a football game or simply to reconnect with the maize and blue spirit that continues to unite our community.
Go Blue!!
Pat Wingate Vice President – OHM Advisors CEEFA Board President
LYNN KATZ RECEIVES U-M CEE 2025 ALUMNI MERIT AWARD
STORY BY ANDREW HOUSMAN
This year, U-M CEE proudly presents the 2025 Alumni Merit Award to U-M CEE alumna Professor Lynn Katz, whose career has served both her
communities and the world. The award recognizes alumni who have embodied the department’s leadership ideals in their commitment to bettering the lives of their communities and the world.
As the Director of the Center for Water and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, Katz has made invaluable contributions to the management of local water supplies. She has innovated methods of renewing oil drilling water in west Texas and developed a management guide for Austin Water. For her dedication to going above and beyond both the campus and city communities, Katz has received the highest service award from the University of Texas, the Civitatis Award.
Outside of Texas, Katz has helped deliver water to remote places in Alaska that have to haul their drinking supply. “We have to work with the communities to be able to make sure that they have trust in the utilities, and that the utilities can have the resources they need to be able to provide the water to the communities,” she said about addressing water scarcity.
While a student at U-M, Katz worked as an EWRE Lab Manager and ran projects on groundwater remediation, activated carbon adsorption and organic contaminants. Becoming close friends with her peers, however, was just as impactful to her journey. “There was a great sense of camaraderie within the EWRE program. It just really felt like a family,” she said of her experience there. “The faculty and peers at U-M are people I’m proud to call my friends.”
Above all, Katz says she is most proud of the students she has mentored and worked with over the years. “It’s been an honor to be able to be exposed to so much intellectual capacity and to help students grow, and to grow with
them,” she said. “That’s been something that keeps me waking up every morning without an alarm clock and ready to go.”
Katz encourages CEE students to get involved in campus and community groups in order to create these opportunities. “Get involved with the people in CEE, as well as groups outside of the department, where you can broaden your knowledge,” she said.
She recalls her own experiences at U-M when giving advice to current-day CEE students. “Be optimistic. You never know what opportunities are going to come to you, so be open to considering them,” she said. “I didn’t set out to get a PhD or be in academia when I started, but the opportunities came, and I’ve never looked back or regretted any of them.”
Katz also mentions that despite institutional threats to funding and research, engineers will persist and continue to innovate, just as they always have throughout time. “Our field has gone through a lot of cycles, but we’re resilient. The need for what we do is not going to go away anytime in the near future,” she said.
That resilience can hone CEE engineers as they work to serve society, as Katz’s own determination and accomplishments have proven. “We always need to work toward providing safe water and clean air to people,” she said. “Engineers are everywhere, and we often work on a grand scale, and what we do matters. It’s our responsibility.”
Congratulations to Dr. Katz on this outstanding achievement.
EVAN AVERY NAMED U-M COE 2025 ALUMNI SERVICE AWARD RECIPIENT
The College of Engineering (CoE) has granted its 2025 Alumni Service Award to Evan Avery for generously volunteering his service to enrich the lives and careers of the department’s students through his Spring Break Externship Program.
A graduate of CEE with a focus in construction management, Avery now works for the nationwide construction contractor Hensel Phelps as a senior
estimator. Still wanting to give back to the community that shaped him during his time at U-M, Avery founded the Externship Program as a way for students and alumni to get engaged and for students to gain career experience within a short period of time.
When Avery graduated in 2011, he realized that not every student was getting opportunities to explore their desired career path. “I thought a lot of students would have benefited from a hands-on experience that shows what their proposed path would really be like,” he said. The Externship Program does that by matching interested students with participating companies for a job shadowing experience.
Avery also explained that the Externship Program allows students to experiment with career paths, helping them focus their professional goals in particular career areas.
“There are some students who wind up working for the companies that they’re matched with, and there are some students who match with companies and discover that even though they really appreciate the experience, it isn’t necessarily what they want to do,” he said. “That’s also a success, though, because they found out in one week that they can cross off something they were considering and redirect their efforts instead of spending a whole summer in an internship or a whole year of their first job figuring all that out.” In other words, they can adjust their list of places to apply for work or their remaining college curriculum based on what they discovered over spring break.
The externship program presents a chance for alumni to get involved and
give back to the school, as well. “This is an opportunity for companies and alumni to get engaged without a massive time commitment,” he said. “It’s nice to be able to give back directly to the CEE department and maintain that continuity with your community. “There are so many different paths a CEE student might pursue, and students are making big decisions based on limited information. It’s amazing how much of an impact you can have on the future courses of their lives just by sharing a little bit of your time and expertise. It’s been a very rewarding experience.”
Avery noted that every student gets placed in an environment that both aligns with their own interests and also exposes them to new roles they might be interested in, creating engineers who understand the breadth of opportunities and the depth of future positions they might hold as leaders in the industry.
“We try to give the students as broad an exposure as possible within that firm that they’re matched with so that they can see what their life would look like on the other side in a variety of divisions and a variety of roles,” he said.
“It took some heavy lifting to get the program off the ground, and I participate in the program every year, so it’s great to see it growing firsthand. But it’s also great to see it being recognized and appreciated, and to know that the department and college are also engaged and behind it. That really means a lot,” he said about receiving the award.
Congratulations to Evan Avery on receiving this award.
STORY BY ANDREW HOUSMAN
PATRICIA BRAINARD
We want to thank Patricia Brainard for her 17 years of hard work and dedication to CEE as department administrator. Brainard has been an invaluable contributor to CEE’s culture and operations since she joined the department in 2008.
She has immensely contributed to CEE’s teamwork coordination and efficiency through her cross-training and overlapping team system, helping to build healthy and productive relationships within the department. By linking values and appreciation through ongoing events and programs like staff onboarding, appreciation pumpkins, staff values thank you cards, the staff appreciation luncheon, staff excellence award, student award nominations, ‘shout-outs’ at monthly staff meetings and snacks for the first week of classes, she has helped foster a culture of recognition and belonging.
Brainard has, in turn, created a “culture of appreciation” within CEE.
“We cheer for each other at awards ceremonies and are genuinely proud to work with each other and see the teams grow. We have a reputation for being a great place to work, for growing our staff and creating pipelines for them to advance their careers within CEE,” Pat said.
Reflecting on Pat’s contributions, Yafeng Yin, the Donald Malloure department chair of civil and environmental engineering, said, “Pat’s unwavering commitment and positive leadership have truly shaped the heart of our department. Her efforts to foster a welcoming, inclusive and high-performing environment are felt by every member of our community. We are deeply grateful for her countless contributions and the legacy of collaboration and caring she leaves behind.”
Brainard has also successfully
addressed human resources and financial issues, coordinated departmental operations and hired dozens of talented staff members to support strategic initiatives and regular operations.
Brainard has also been a trailblazer in implementing community-building principles into every aspect of her work as the first staff member in CEE to earn the DEI Certificate. In particular, her personal experiences with disability issues have also made her a headstrong advocate for accessibility and inclusion reforms, such as the installation of wheelchair signs and automatic doors within the CEE building.
Brainard has been recognized several times throughout her career for her contributions and impact. She was this year’s winner of the Judith A. Pitney Staff Service Career, awarded as the highest honor to staff at the College of Engineering. Her dedication to accessibility and inclusion earned her a nomination for the 2024 James T. Neubacher Award, and her leadership in fostering an inclusive culture was recognized with the 2024 University Distinguished Diversity Leadership Award.
She received the CoE Excellence in Staff Service Award and was a finalist for both the Candace Johnson Award and the President’s Staff Innovation Award.
Brainard used the funds from these awards to establish a library of 52 leadership and DEI books, which are available to faculty and staff in CEE, and to purchase monogrammed CEE polo shirts for the staff to show appreciation.
Brainard has increased collaboration between CEE and other U-M engineering departments, extending her contributions beyond the departmental level. Pat stepped up to help the College of Engineering (CoE) as the Interim Unit Administrator for Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (NA&ME), earning her the NA&ME Department Chair’s Lifesaver Award for 2024-2025. In addition, she became Chair of the Creativity, Innovation and Daring Committee at the CoE from 2018 to 2020, leading the creation of the “Creating Conversations” program to foster collaboration and innovation across CoE departments.
“I’ll miss my colleagues the most and the difference we make every day,” Pat said about her time at CEE. “Sometimes the difference may be small or seemingly insignificant, but it could be a big deal to someone else down the road. The ripple effect reflects the potential impact we make on others.”
COTEL
Associate Professor Aline Cotel will officially retire from the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering on December 31, 2026, after entering furlough earlier that year. Her career at Michigan has been marked by innovative research, inspired teaching and a commitment to global collaboration and equity in engineering.
Cotel began her academic journey in Paris, earning a degree in aeronautical engineering at the École Polytechnique Féminine before moving to the United States to complete her M.S. and PhD in aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington. After an early faculty appointment at the University of Manitoba, she joined the University of Michigan in 1999. In recognition of her outstanding teaching and mentorship, she was named an Arthur F. Thurnau Associate Professor in 2016.
Her scholarship has focused on ecohydraulics, particularly how turbulence affects fish behavior and habitat. Cotel developed new frameworks for understanding fish–flow interactions and applied her expertise to restoration efforts in the St. Clair–Detroit River system, contributing to the recovery of critical spawning habitats. Her work has left an impact both in theory and in practice, advancing science while also strengthening ecosystems in various locations from South Africa to Norway.
Cotel’s international work extended to Liberia, where she helped launch a USAID project in 2011 to rebuild higher education in engineering and agriculture. From this effort grew summer leadership camps for female engineering students and the first student chapter of the Society of
Women Engineers in Africa. The program left a lasting impact on both Michigan students and their Liberian peers, with two participants later earning graduate degrees at U-M.
Her more recent international collaborations have taken her to Tanzania, where she has worked with colleagues across disciplines to expand access to water and electricity in Maasai villages. The project reflects the way Cotel’s work has always combined engineering innovation with a commitment to community wellbeing, building partnerships that extend far beyond the laboratory.
Cotel has also been a dedicated leader in international engagement. In 2017, she served as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in South Africa, forging partnerships that extended Michigan’s reach abroad. At home, she guided students in global service and research projects—such as the Pantanal Partnership student organization—ensuring that Michigan engineers gained hands-on experience tackling water challenges worldwide.
A passionate advocate for women in engineering, Cotel co-founded the WomenWater Nexus and created the Women in Fluids Network, mentoring students and junior faculty as they launched their careers. Her efforts to open doors and create opportunities reflect a career defined by service and leadership.
Reflecting on Professor Cotel’s distinguished career, Yafeng Yin, Donald Malloure department chair of civil and environmental engineering, remarked, “Professor Cotel has exemplified what it means to be a global and compassionate engineer. Her vision, dedication and leadership have transformed not only the field of ecohydraulics but also the lives and careers of countless students and colleagues. We are deeply grateful for her service and the indelible mark she has left on our department and the engineering community at large.”
As she prepares for retirement, Professor Cotel leaves behind a legacy of scholarship, mentorship and global impact. Her work will continue to inspire colleagues and students, carrying forward the values of excellence and collaboration that have guided her distinguished career.
FACULTY RETIREMENT:
WILL HANSEN
Professor Will Hansen will officially retire from the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering on May 24, 2026, closing out a distinguished career that has spanned more than four decades. Although he is currently on furlough, his impact on the department, the profession and generations of students is already deeply felt.
Hansen’s journey began in Denmark, where he earned his master’s degree at the Technical University of Denmark in 1977. He went on to complete his PhD in civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1983, establishing a foundation that would shape his lifelong dedication to advancing knowledge in concrete materials and pavement engineering. Shortly thereafter, he joined the University of Michigan, where he has been a cornerstone of the civil engineering faculty ever since.
Throughout his career, Hansen’s research has pushed the field forward in profound ways. His work on the mechanistic behavior of cementitious materials has become foundational to understanding how concrete performs under stress and over time. He made significant contributions to creep and shrinkage modeling, the development of high-performance concrete with longterm frost durability and the study of curling and warping in pavements. Over the years, he has authored more than 150 scholarly publications, producing a body of work that continues to guide both academics and practitioners.
Hansen’s influence extended far beyond the laboratory. He served as director of the Michigan Department of Transportation’s Center of Excellence
on Concrete Pavement Performance, forging essential ties between research and practice. Nationally, he played an active role in the American Concrete Institute, where he served on numerous technical committees and chaired ACI Committee 231 on early-age properties of concrete. In recognition of his service and scholarship, he was named an ACI Fellow in 2006 and received the Delmar L. Bloem Distinguished Service Award in 2012.
In the classroom, Hansen’s passion for teaching was evident to his students, who twice recognized him as the ASCECEE Teacher of the Year. In 2013, the College of Engineering honored him with its Excellence in Service Award, a testament to his commitment not only to research and teaching but also to building community within the department. His mentorship has guided countless undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom now carry forward his legacy in academia, industry and government.
Reflecting on Professor Hansen’s extraordinary career, Yafeng Yin, Donald Malloure department chair of civil and environmental engineering, shared, “Professor Hansen’s dedication to advancing the science and practice of concrete materials has set new standards for our field. His commitment to research excellence, strong industry partnerships and unwavering mentorship has inspired generations of engineers. The department is deeply grateful for his remarkable service, and his legacy will resonate for many years to come.”
As Professor Hansen approaches retirement, the department reflects with gratitude on a career that exemplifies dedication, innovation and service. His work has left an enduring imprint on the study and practice of civil engineering, and his influence will continue to be felt long after he steps away from the classroom and laboratory.
IN MEMORIAM
In order by year of graduation
Charles A. Froman BSE ‘51 08/21/2025
Philip C. Webb BSE ‘52 11/06/2024
John I. Iverson
BSE ‘53, JD ‘58 05/07/2025
Ronald G. Ghormley
BSE ‘53, MSE ‘54 08/09/2025
Rex J. Youse BSE ‘57 11/13/2024
Eugene L. Marvin BSE ‘57 12/22/2024
William F. DeYoung BSE ‘57 08/01/2025
W. James Wells MSE ‘58 11/07/2020
Donald L. Holley MSE ‘59 06/08/2025
Gordon P. Start
BSE ‘60, MPA ‘61 10/15/2024
Wayne L. Woodard BSE ‘60 12/27/2024
Young H. Kim BSE ‘60 05/14/2025
Thomas Newhof
BSE ‘60, MSE ‘61 06/24/2025
Garrett H. Evans
BSE ‘60, MSE ‘66 07/23/2025
Michael H. Peters BSE ‘61 11/19/2022
Jerry A. McLellan BSE ‘61 09/13/2024
Frederick G. Vankoughnet BSE ‘61
05/25/2025
Gilberto M. Font BSE ‘61 10/16/2024
Chen C. Hsu
MSE ‘61, PhD ‘65 03/22/2025
William H. Townsend BSE ‘61, MSE ‘63, PhD ‘72 01/06/2025
Robert D. Atkinson MSE ‘65 02/06/2020
James W. Eckert BSE ‘65, MSE 11/27/2024
Carl H. Huber
BSE ‘65, MSE ‘66 03/12/2025
Barry McGuire BSE ‘66 12/11/2024
Kenneth Stone MSE ‘68 10/21/2024
John A. Walter MSE ‘68
01/09/2025
Michael T. Truax BSE ‘68 03/29/2025
Marvin G. Booth BSE ‘69 12/11/2021
Rodney J. Sumpter BSE ‘70 04/29/2025
Hun Chong MSE ‘71 06/17/2023
Douglas J. Uhren BSE ‘74 09/17/2020
Henry W. Lilly BSE ‘74 04/01/2025
Brian P. LaSage BSE ‘81 11/27/2024
Jefferey T. Anagnostou MSE ‘91 02/11/2019
Janine M. Hutchinson BSE ‘94 03/12/2025
Matthew I. MacLachlan BSE ‘96 03/03/2025
2350 HAYWARD STREET, 2105 GG BROWN BUILDING ANN ARBOR, MI 48109-2125
Did You Know?
One of the University’s first four faculty residences, this building stood near the present site of the Clements Library. From 1840 to 1877 it served as a professor’s home before being moved to house the Dental School. An east wing was added in 1878, and by 1892 it had been remodeled into a threestory facility with a west-facing entrance. It housed the College of Engineering until 1922, when it was demolished to make way for the Clements Library. After a new engineering building opened in 1904, it became known as the “Old Engineering Building.”
HOW ALUMNI CAN STAY INVOLVED IN CEE
Your connection to CEE continues long after graduation. Share your expertise by mentoring current students, speaking to classes or groups or joining panels and recruitment events. Your real-world insights help shape the next generation of engineers and foster a strong learning community beyond the classroom.
Support CEE’s mission by directing your philanthropy to advance education and research, while helping to develop skilled engineers who make a positive impact. Every contribution— whether your time, knowledge or financial support—strengthens our department’s excellence.
Stay informed by subscribing to our quarterly alumni newsletter. Receive updates on department news, upcoming events and new opportunities to get involved so you can stay connected to CEE’s progress.
Ready to take the next step? Visit our alumni page at https://cee. engin.umich.edu/about/alumni/ or email cee-alumni@umich.edu to learn more and join us today.
