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PROGRAM AREA HIGHLIGHTS
Construction Engineering Management
CEM welcomed David Ford as Vecellio Professor and Mike Biscotte joined the group as Assistant Professor of Practice. R. David Curfman delivered the 21st Vecellio Distinguished Lecture. The Vecellio scholars for 2022 are Sherlock Banks, Charlotte Clyde, Martha Caguiat, Jacob McGee, and Mandy Smith. The Fellows are Yueyan Gu, Mostafa Meimand, and Joshua Trump. VCEMP also had some fun doing team building at the Virginia Tech ropes course and reinstituted the VCEMP hard-hat recognition for graduating students. Freddy Paige is working on a $1.2 million NSF BPE Equity Center project as an internal research lead for cultural pillar. The Principal Investigator on the Project is Dean Julia M. Ross.
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Environmental and Water Resources
EWR welcomes two new assistant professors, David Muñoz and Jingqiu Liao. Linsey Marr spoke about Covid-19 transmission and mitigation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s event “Lets Clear the Air on Covid” in March. She was also inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Alumni in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. There were two NSF CAREER Awards earned by Landon Marston and Hosein Foroutan. Amy Pruden and colleagues launched a new National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NSF NRT) focused on convergent graduate training at the interfaces of policy, data science, environmental science, and engineering. Pruden also completed a research leave assigning exploring antibiotic resistance in coupled human and environmental ecosystems in Botswana. Jingqiu Liao’s nationwide survey of listeria in natural environments was published in Nature Microbiology. Stanley Grant’s NSF Growing Convergence Research (GCR) project was funded into Phase II, which brings to the team an additional $2.4M over the next three years. The team authored a feature article describing the GCR project in the American Chemical Society flagship journal Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T). Peter Vikesland was named a Fellow of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP). Andrea Dietrich is lead author for American Water Works Association revision of manual for taste, odors and appearance issues in drink water.
Geotechnical Engineering
Joseph Vantassel will join the Geotechnical program as an Assistant Professor in January 2023. His expertise is in engineering geophysics and geotechnical site characterization. Reihaneh Hosseini will also join as a Research Scientist in January. Hosseini’s expertise is in partially saturated soils, in particular, the numerical modeling of multi-phase fluids in porous media. The geotechnical faculty have been honored with several awards this year. Sherif Abdelaziz received the C.A. Hogentotle Award from the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). Adrian Rodriguez-Marek received the 2021 Outstanding Paper Award from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. Nina Stark was called to help with the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) team to survey and study damages due to the Yellowstone floods in Wyoming in June 2022. Tom Brandon updated the NAVFAC DM-7.1, which was released by the Navy in February 2022. Alba Yerro-Colom is working to assess the tractive performance of tracked vehicles on “mud” (saturated finegrained soils). This is the first all-women team being funded by the Automotive Research Center (U.S. Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center).
Structural Engineering and Materials
The SEM group welcomed a new faculty member, Monica Arul. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and her research interests center on wind engineering, extreme wind characterization, infrastructure resilience to windstorms, structural health monitoring and translational data science. Roberto Leon was the recipient of the G. Haaijer Award from the American Institute of Steel Construction. Dr. Leon’s graduate class on forensic engineering has been extended to form a conjoined undergraduate section to focus on the formal processes for failure analysis, the societal reasons for all types of failures, and the way the lessons learnt are applied. Rodrigo Sarlo is also co-teaching a new undergraduate course called “remote sensing and cyber-physical systems in civil engineering” which will expose students to new and evolving sensing/monitoring techniques across the civil engineering field. Sarlo is also collaborating with VDOT on augmented reality assistance for bridge inspection using virtual interfaces and computer vision to digitize the inspection reporting process. Scott Case is working on a three year project with Brian Lattimer to examine the response of structural thermoplastic composites to extreme thermal loads. He is also busy working with Luna Lab and NanoSonic to develop computational tools to support the design and analysis of composite structures. Matt Eatherton is currently working on several research projects related to the innovative design of floor systems in buildings, diaphragm behavior and retrofit, structural fuses, and new configurations of steel moment connections. Eric Jacques is co-PI on a recently awarded $1 million DoD-funded project to develop the next generation explosives and propellants based on additive manufacturing technology. Carin RobertsWollmann is serving on code writing committees for the American Concrete Institute (ACI) and the Precast/ Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI), including ACI Committee 318 - Stuctural Concrete Building Code.
Sustainable Land Development
The Sustainable Land Development program will be renamed the Bowman Program for Sustainable Land Development. Other news for the program include the establishment of three endowments by John and Connie DeBell. The master’s program in sustainable land development launched in fall 2021 and it now in its second year with 17 M.S. and two Ph.D. students. Coordinator Kevin Young was promoted to Associate Professor of Practice. Assistant Coordinator Claire White received the CEE Alumni Teaching Excellence Award. Holly Casey joined the group as Assistant Professor of Practice, which will help in teaching the increasing number of students. In fact, more than 400 students completed at least one LDDI course during AY 2021-22. The program was excited to return to in-person events for the career fair mixer, design charette, field trips and resume review workshops. This year also marked a record Giving Day for LDDI, both in donors (more than 140) and revenue (over $20k)
The TISE faculty and students have been recognized with honors throughout the past year. Hesham Rakha received the IEEE ITS Outstanding Research Award (2021) from the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society. Additionally, Ebenezer Fanijo, Ph.D. student of Alex Brand, was partially funded through the Ford University Research Program to research advanced in situ quantitative phase microscopy to measure real time corrosion kinetics at the nanoscale. This never-before-done research offers an unprecedented real-time quantification of spatiotemporal corrosion kinetics. Alex Brand was elected in April 2020 to be the Young Professionals Network Liason for the Cements Division of the American Ceramic Society and he also coorganized the first International Conference on Construction Materials and Structures (ICCMA-2021). The conference was hosted by St. Thomas Institute for Science and Technology where he was a keynote speaker. Susan Hotle and Kathleen Hancock were awarded a DRIVE grant to develop, redesign, innovate, vitalize, and enhance flexible online learning opportunities for Virginia Tech students.
Nick Hinze, Zhou Wang, and Antonio Trani collaborated with alumni Courtney Beamon and David Leech to develop a small aircraft runway length analysis tool (SARLAT) for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The computer application replaces old methods to estimate runway length for small airports. Hinze and Trani also released a version 4.0 of Runway Exit Design Model for the FAA which is widely used to design and improve runways at airports.
Hosein Foroutan receives NSF CAREER award to understand how plastic particles are aerosolized
Each summer, many people head to beaches to play in the ocean and listen to the relaxing sound of waves crashing. However, the same rhythmic water movement that helps some beachgoers ease their minds might also be contributing to a worrisome human health risk: the aerosolization of tiny micro- and nano-plastics (MNPs).
Hosein Foroutan, an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award to investigate air-sea interaction as a source of atmospheric MNPs.
MNPs are plastic fragments found in virtually all ecosystems. According to Foroutan, they can be easily ingested or inhaled by living organisms, causing inflammation and damage to cells. “Microplastics are one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time,” Foroutan said. “Numerous studies have highlighted the adverse impact of microplastics on human and ecological health, with recent research reporting the presence of microplastics deep in human lung and blood.” The danger of MNPs is compounded by the uncertainty surrounding their origin.
He noted that other studies have detected MNPs in atmospheric samples collected in urban, suburban, and even remote areas far from obvious sources. But how does it get there?
“Most research on MNPs has focused on marine environments,” said Foroutan. “However, the source of airborne microplastics is not well understood, and there are critical knowledge gaps in this area. We know MNPs have been found in marine atmospheric samples, but little is known about the processes and mechanisms that control the release and transfer of microplastics from oceans into the atmosphere,” he added.
Foroutan’s project will expand on existing research to determine if tiny MNP particles are aerosolized by oceanic wave breaking and bubble bursting. His team will investigate whether and how the size, shape, age, or material of the MNP particles affects the aerosolization. The experiment will not only allow for human risk assessment, Foroutan said, but it also may shed light on the “missing plastic paradox,” which states that 99 percent of plastic litter entering the open ocean is unaccounted for. To conduct its research, Foroutan’s team had to figure out how to reproduce realistic breaking waves and the ensuing bubble bursting in a smallscale laboratory setup. Team members designed and built an aerosol generation tank that consists of a closed-circuit, air-tight tank and two concentric tubes generating a uniform plunging sheet of water to simulate sea-spray aerosols. The resulting aerosolized particles can then be sampled in the headspace.
Foroutan’s team will use the data to develop and parameterize a process model that could be used to estimate the surface flux of sea spray MNP aerosols. Finally, team members will integrate their MNP flux model into a large-scale atmospheric model to simulate and quantify the transport and deposition of sea spray MNP aerosols in relevant environmental compartments.
“Plastics are a significant environmental concern. They impact human, ecological, and environmental health,” said Foroutan. “This project could have a broad impact on human health, and our unique framework hopefully will provide a new way for environmental scientists and engineers to address this growing problem.”
