2017-2018 Annual Report School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology
ANNUAL REPORT
JULY 2017 – JUNE 2018
LEADERSHIP Donald R. Webster, Ph.D., P.E. Karen and John Huff School Chair James A. Mulholland, Ph.D. Associate Chair for Graduate Programs Susan E. Burns, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs Adjo A. Amekudzi-Kennedy, Ph.D., F.ASCE Associate Chair for Global Engineering Leadership and Research Development Ashley Coogan Director of Development ashley.coogan@ce.gatech.edu P / 404.385.1604
SCHOOL OF CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING AT GEORGIA TECH 790 Atlantic Drive N.W. Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0355 communications@ce.gatech.edu P / 404.894.2201 C E . G AT E C H . E D U WORDS BY J O S H UA S T E WA RT PHOTOS & DESIGN BY J E S S H U N T- R A L S T O N
COVER: THE TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE THAT CROSSED THE UNITED STATES FROM OREGON TO SOUTH CAROLINA PUT GEORGIA TECH IN A TWILIGHT DARKNESS FOR THE FIRST DAY OF FALL CLASSES. THIS VIEW FROM THE ROOF OF THE JESSE W. MASON BUILDING SHOWS SOME OF THE THOUSANDS WHO GATHERED ON TECH’S CAMPUS TO EXPERIENCE NEAR-TOTALITY WITH THE SKYLINE OF MIDTOWN AND DOWNTOWN ATLANTA BEYOND.
We are creative realists
who design at the intersection of people, nature and civilization.
global citizens and pragmatic leaders
improving the earth at our feet.
entrepreneurs and strategists
defining public policy and the future of sustainability.
innovative optimists
dedicated to solving problems and improving the human condition since 1898.
We are CEEatGT.
What’s inside 1
CREATING THE NEXT In conversation with our new Karen and John Huff School Chair
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THE DESIGN THINKERS Rachel, Drew, Ted, Cypress: Students get creative to solve design challenges
13 CONNECTING THE DOTS Our research impact at home and around the world 29 OUR FACULTY Meet our world-renowned scholars, teachers and engineers 31 JACKETS ABROAD Joe S. Mundy scholars contemplate their place in the world 37 FIELD NOTES Global Engineering Leadership Minor explores the Netherlands, China, Japan, Bolivia, England 41 WHAT’S NEW? Facts and figures, honors and awards, welcoming new faculty 47 ALMA MATTERS New mentoring program, industry partnerships, Kenneth Hyatt alumni speaker series 57 OUR EXTERNAL ADVISORY BOARD Newest board members, 2019 alumni trip to Puerto Rico
No. 2 Undergraduate environmental engineering program No. 2 Graduate civil engineering program No. 5 Graduate environmental engineering program
Though you’re just opening this annual report, we’re really closing the book on our 2017-2018 academic year. I find myself, at this turning point, reflecting on this year of transition and enormously excited for what lies ahead. Much of the year has been occupied by our search for a new School Chair, a position I gratefully and humbly accepted May 1. In the interim, I’m proud to say we didn’t miss a beat, thanks to the graceful leadership of my colleague Kimberly Kurtis, who took the reins of the School and helped us maintain consistent quality in our teaching, research and service endeavors. Dr. Kurtis has long served as a mentor and advocate for faculty at Tech, and her presence in the chair’s office over the last year has been stabilizing. Transitions of leadership can sometimes lead to lethargy or inactivity, but the School is as vibrant and forward-thinking as it was a year ago. Now, we look to the future. In this report of our activities for the last year, you’ll find a deeper discussion of those priorities for the years ahead — innovations in our curriculum, new interdisciplinary arenas of research, even more global and entrepreneurial integration. I look forward to working together to realize those priorities. This report also provides a sampling of our activities for the last year, from a new mentoring initiative to some of the ways our students have engaged in design projects to benefit our community, from accomplishments of our alumni to our students’ global impact. You’ll also find an admittedly limited window into our research undertakings (we just can’t encapsulate it all in these limited pages): fundamental work to understand whether we can cloak structures from stress waves like earthquakes or blasts, designs for new Army barracks that are stronger and safer, new rogue wave analysis to help investigators understand why a cargo ship sank, and a software tool using Twitter activity to help first-responders find people in need after major disasters. You can also read about work close to our home in Atlanta understanding the true impact of pollution regulations on the city’s air or how residential septic systems are impacting a key water source for the metro area. It’s true that this is a new beginning for our School in many ways, but what will not change in this new chapter is our commitment to improving the human condition. Our students will continue to build a foundation of engineering fundamentals through rigorous coursework and projects, and our faculty will continue to push the boundaries of knowledge. I’m exhilarated by the collaborative work ahead with our students, faculty, staff and alumni. Thank you for your continued support of our School. What we do would not be possible without it.
Donald R. Webster, Ph.D., P.E. Karen and John Huff School Chair and Professor
SOURCES: CE.GATECH.EDU/SOURCES. PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON.
No. 2 Undergraduate civil engineering program
Welcome.
CREATING THE NEXT DONALD R. WEBSTER became the 16th permanent chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering May 1 after a yearlong nationwide search. Webster has been part of the School’s faculty since 1997 and a member of its leadership team for more than a decade, most recently as associate chair for finance and administration. A recognized leader in environmental fluid mechanics — especially the influence of fluid motion and turbulence on biological systems — Webster also has been at the vanguard of teaching innovation at Georgia Tech. He sat down recently to talk about his vision for the School’s future.
One of the things you talked about at some length in the interview process was finding ways to innovate the curriculum in civil and environmental engineering. Why is that important? We’re at a critical point in higher education, in general; nationally, there’s been a lot of discussion about the value of education, the value of college degrees, and we need to be cognizant of that and think about, what is the value we’re providing to our students? Historically, we’ve been very strong in things like problem-solving and looking at innovative solutions to civil and environmental applications. Right now, we have a great opportunity to frame our educational programs in a way that that value is clear to our prospective students. We also are at a point where [the accrediting body for engineering programs] is changing some of their nuts and bolts of the the accreditation process, and this actually gives us more flexibility. I’d really like to get our students more engaged in exciting, innovative things within the realm of civil and environmental engineering much earlier in the curriculum than is currently happening. They really don’t get those discipline-specific courses until probably their third year. At that point, they may have changed their interests because they may not have realized what impact they can have within this field and what their opportunities are. Is part of that a response to an industry that’s changing a little bit too? What we hear from employers has shifted over the last 10 years, certainly. They’re looking for people that have what we call 21st century skills — communication, leadership, management, business savvy — to complement the problem-solving skills that come from a rigorous engineering curriculum. There is an opportunity to blend some of those attributes into our educational mission.
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We have the global engineering leadership minor. That sounds like a way to address that, but it also sounds like infusing that even more broadly so if you’re not in that minor, you would still get some of those kinds of experiences. That’s right. The leadership skills, the perspective on [engineering] grand challenges, is a very good match to our degree programs. We have a great example with our technical communications program that’s been in place for over 20 years now. The content is being pushed into specific courses rather than students being pulled out into a course that’s specifically focused on that particular skill set. That’s been hugely successful. What about the graduate program, and specifically about master’s students? You’ve said you want to focus on whole-person education in that program. What is that? It speaks to just the same things. Traditionally, the master’s program has been very focused on technical content, and that has served us quite well. But I think the demand on our master’s graduates has shifted a bit, and employers are looking for people with a broader set of skills — the same things I enumerated a moment ago, in terms of business savvy, communication skills, leadership, entrepreneurial mindsets. I think there could be some value in courses that cut across the technical affinity groups and might create a better synergy or cohort mindset among our students in that they have some of the same experiences or some of the same coursework in the year or two that they’re here working on their master’s degree. How do you see the research endeavors in the School evolving and changing in the years ahead? The breadth of things that our faculty and students are working on is almost overwhelming. That really speaks to the nature of civil and environmental engineering and how broad it is. There’s a real opportunity to frame some of those things in more synergistic ways. Like smart cities — it’s almost become a buzzword already, but it gives a topical area where many people can partner and bring different skill sets from very different perspectives together to address some of the really challenging issues. Big data is another where people working on seemingly disparate technical challenges can have a common point of discussion. What I hope to see in the next few years is
“One of the things I truly love about Georgia Tech is the opportunity to partner with researchers and collaborators outside of our home unit. There are very few barriers to doing that kind of thing.”
PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
more of those connections. One of the things I truly love about Georgia Tech is the opportunity to partner with researchers and collaborators outside of our home unit. There are very few barriers to doing that kind of thing. Finally, diversity and inclusion — something you’ve made a point of bringing up in conversations with students, faculty and alumni. Why is that important to you? The more diversity you have on your team — and the more different backgrounds and experiences that people bring to the table — the more creativity and game-changing ideas you’re going to have coming forward. We have a number of dimensions where this manifests. First of all, when you think about gender balance, we’re very well positioned compared to many of our peers. The undergraduate population is very close to being balanced between men and women. We may actually go past 50 percent women students in our undergraduate population this year; that’s pretty remarkable. Our graduate population is not quite there. We need to be proactive to provide funding and support for women who are interested in pursuing degrees after graduation. We’re currently about 25 percent women among our faculty ranks. That is very well positioned compared to our peers but doesn’t really
reflect our undergraduate population very well. As our women undergraduates are looking for mentors and looking for guidance on how their career can move forward, they need women that they can seek out and ask questions about their own experiences and seek their advice. So we have work to do. The other dimension has to do with ethnic diversity and people of color. Georgia Tech has a reputation of being very well positioned in this regard, but it takes constant diligence, constant recruitment, and making a community that is inviting and comfortable for all people. You’ve got a lot of work ahead in the next five years, it sounds like. Absolutely. It’s a labor of love. One of the things I really enjoy about being at Georgia Tech is interacting with our students and faculty and staff. Everybody’s so smart; they’re so engaged in doing amazing things. It’s always a joy to interact with them and hear about what they’re trying to think of next. HEAR MUCH MORE FROM THIS CONVERSATION, INCLUDING HOW ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS FIT INTO THE SCHOOL’S FOCUS, ON OUR FIELD NOTES PODCAST: CE.GATECH.EDU/ANNUALREPORT
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THE DESIGN THINKERS PHOTO: ROB FELT
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FOURTH-YEAR CIVIL ENGINEERING UNDERGRADUATE RACHEL BRASHEAR STANDS IN FRONT OF THE PROJECT THAT HAS OCCUPIED MUCH OF HER TIME FOR THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF: THE CREATION OF A NEW MAKER SPACE IN GEORGIA TECH’S VAN LEER BUILDING. BRASHEAR HAS BEEN FILLING THE ROLE OF ON-SITE PROJECT ENGINEER FOR GILBANE BUILDING COMPANY WHILE SHE FINISHES HER DEGREE.
RACHEL
She started as an intern, now Rachel Brashear is helping build Tech’s newest maker space When most students’ phones ring in class, it’s a friend or a parent or someone else who can wait. For RACHEL BRASHEAR, though, ignoring that phone call could’ve slowed progress on an $11 million project creating Georgia Tech’s newest maker space. Hopefully that means her professors will forgive her for answering occasionally. “I get calls sometimes in the middle of class from trade contractors, and I’m like, ‘I can’t talk to you right now,’” Brashear recounted this spring. “One time I was doing something and the architect called me, and I was like, ‘I should probably answer this.’” Why would trade contractors and architects working on the new Interdisciplinary Design Commons in Van Leer be bugging a fourth-year civil engineering student throughout the day? The answer is thanks to an incredible opportunity afforded Brashear by the firm leading construction on the project, Gilbane Building Company. For the last year and a half, she’s been filling the role of on-site project engineer, working 20 hours a week or more while taking a full course load to finish her degree. Brashear is part of Gilbane’s small team on the
construction site day to day, along with a project manager and a superintendent — the result of great timing when she went to the company looking for an internship. The design commons in Tech’s Van Leer Building will occupy 15,000 square feet with collaboration and design areas and equipment for electronic prototyping, embedded systems design, and fabrication. The possibilities of such a space are not lost on Brashear, even as she’s deeply ingrained in the details of construction. “[This project is] the gift that keeps giving. Things are going to be produced there, and things are going to be invented, and awesome things are going to happen there,” Brashear said. “It’s really rewarding to know that I’ve been able to help future students create great things.” That’s not to say the experience hasn’t come without challenges. Brashear has a lot of responsibility — and a lot to balance as she finishes her degree. “One of the tough things from the beginning was getting confident enough in what I was doing to be authoritative in my position,” Brashear said. “I had no choice but to figure it out; it was my responsibility to make it work. So I definitely learned a lot really fast.” PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
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GRADUATE AND POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCHERS PREPARE THEIR EQUIPMENT BEFORE TESTING 3D-PRINTED DESIGNS CREATED BY SEVENTH-GRADERS FROM ATLANTA’S DREW CHARTER SCHOOL. RIGHT: PROJECT LEADER ARIEL SIEGEL WORKS WITH STUDENTS. THE MIDDLE-SCHOOLERS MADE A PLANT-ROOTINSPIRED DEEP-PILE FOUNDATION AFTER LEARNING ABOUT GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING AND BIOINSPIRED DESIGN FROM SIEGEL AND OTHER GEORGIA TECH STUDENTS.
DREW
7th-graders design, 3D print, test bio-inspired foundations
Two months of engineering lessons culminated in this: a printed plastic model buried in a bucket of sand. How well would it perform? Did the design team balance cost and function well enough? Those were the questions facing more than 100 seventh-graders from Atlanta’s DREW CHARTER SCHOOL when they came to Georgia Tech in the spring to cap a semester learning about geotechnical engineering from graduate students in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The models were part of a bio-inspired design challenge, the capstone of the lessons. For some teams, it took more than 10 pounds of force to pull their design from the bucket — each a miniature of a plant-root-inspired deep-pile foundation. For others, it was less than a pound. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it,” said CANDICE PRICE, the seventh-grade science teacher at Drew. “I’m all about doing things differently, kids thinking in a different way, pushing them to see what’s out there. … Bio-inspired design was a totally new concept for them.“ A group of master’s and Ph.D. students spent upwards of 250 hours delivering the problembased learning module to the Drew students and planning the finale on campus. The outreach was funded by the Center for Bio-Mediated and Bio-Inspired Geotechnics, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center co-led by Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor David Frost. Master’s student ARIEL SIEGEL led the modules, which were designed to align with the state of Georgia’s educational standards. “It’s always been something I’ve enjoyed, working with kids,” Siegel said. “Also, being a female in engineering, I recognize that we are very under-represented and that I was privileged enough to always be encouraged by my parents, even though they were not engineers. They were familiar with the field and able to guide me in that direction. But to a lot of students who don’t have that exposure, it’s hard to find a way into this field.
PHOTOS: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
“So, I’m hoping that this might encourage some who might not have known about it before.”
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PHOTO: KARI WATKINS
TED
Students offer Dutch-inspired ideas to create a resilient gateway to downtown Atlanta
RIDE ALONG WITH STUDENTS DURING THEIR NETHERLANDS JOURNEY AT CE.GATECH.EDU/ANNUALREPORT
In a few years, Ted Turner Drive in downtown Atlanta may well owe some of its reimagined design to a School of Civil and Environmental Engineering class trip to the Netherlands. Two groups of students who made that journey returned with new ideas about sustainability and community infrastructure. They infused those ideas into suggestions for remaking the Ted Turner Drive corridor and presented them to city officials and community advocates as part of a design challenge orchestrated by the city’s Renew Atlanta bond program. “Dutch infrastructure creates a space where there are people. I hope that [Ted Turner Drive becomes] a space people are using — people who want to walk and people who want to bike can use it, but also people who want to drive can still use it,” said ANDREW POFAHL, a member of the DELFT BLAUW DESIGN GROUP that won second prize in the final design competition.
In developing their designs, the groups met with residents around the corridor and collected feedback. JACK GLODEK’S DARE TO DELFT GROUP (Delft was the city that served as the students’ home base in the Netherlands) created a game where residents designed their vision for the road, incorporating what each person saw as the ideal balance of road, bike path, sidewalk, parking and trees. “The most beneficial thing for me was figuring out ways of talking to people about ideas,” Glodek said. “Through the game, we presented these ideas — bike lanes, buffers between modes — and I think it was much more effective.” Glodek’s teammate RE’NISHA CLAYTON said she knows some of the groups’ Dutch-inspired ideas push the envelope. But she hopes that pushes the city to think in new ways. “It was challenging to get out of the mindset of saying, ‘It can’t happen in America.’ The attitude is very different over in the Netherlands. So first we just had to get out of that mindset of ‘it can’t happen’ and find a way to say, ‘It will, or we’ll make it happen another way.’”
PHOTO: LUKE XINJING XU
For both groups, accomplishing that goal included bike lanes and wider sidewalks. They proposed slimming the four-lane, one-way road down to two lanes with traffic flowing in both directions and maybe a center turn lane. They want to add new stormwater systems that also separate people, bikes and cars while adding trees.
They suggested new public art drawing on the area’s history. And they advocated for more green space — lots more green space — for an area now covered in concrete.
TED TURNER DRIVE IN DOWNTOWN ATLANTA, WHICH IS CURRENTLY A THREE- AND FOUR-LANE, ONE-WAY STREET SURROUNDED BY PARKING LOTS AND CONCRETE. IN A CITYSPONSORED DESIGN COMPETITION, STUDENTS SUGGESTED USING DUTCH DESIGNS TO MAKE THE CORRIDOR MORE INVITING TO LOCAL RESIDENTS WHILE ACCOMMODATING CARS, BIKES AND PEDESTRIANS. LEFT: STUDENTS IN THE SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORTATION ABROAD CLASS VISIT A HISTORIC WINDMILL IN SCHIEDAM DURING THEIR TRIP TO THE NETHERLANDS.
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CYPRESS Capstone Expo winners create a simple solution that saves drivers tons of time at I-20 and I-285 in west Atlanta
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AN AERIAL VIEW OF THE INTERCHANGE AT INTERSTATE 20 AND INTERSTATE 285 ON ATLANTA’S WESTSIDE. CAPSTONE DESIGN EXPO TEAM ATLANTA CYPRESS ENGINEERING PROPOSED SOME SIMPLE CHANGES TO THE JUNCTION TO IMPROVE TRAFFIC FLOW, POTENTIALLY SAVING DRIVERS A YEAR’S WORTH OF COMMUTE TIME EVERY AFTERNOON.
A simple design change with the potential of saving Atlanta drivers a combined year’s worth of travel time every day took home the civil and environmental engineering top prize at the Georgia Tech Capstone Design Expo this spring. The Georgia Department of Transportation tasked TEAM ATLANTA CYPRESS ENGINEERING with improving the interchange at I-20 and I-285 on Atlanta’s Westside for the next few years as the department ramps up for a complete rebuild of the junction. The team’s solution was deceptively simple: restripe the lanes from 285 to westbound I-20 to eliminate merges responsible for bottlenecks that can stretch for miles. Simulations of the change showed staggering improvement, said civil engineering senior ANDREW POFAHL. “We looked at traffic volumes five years from now in 2023, we threw them into this model with a bunch of other data from GDOT,” Pofahl said, “and what we found is the movement from I-285 coming south to I-20 westbound, you save 10 ½ minutes. Just going through the interchange. In less than a mile, you save 10 ½ minutes. And then from I-285 north to I-20 west, it’s almost 7 ½ minutes.” With weekday afternoon volumes around 50,000 vehicles, the savings add up quickly. And they ripple out from the interchange, improving traffic flow even miles away. “Changes [at the intersection] vastly improve the whole network,” said Ramiro Santana. The project was one of their top choices, he said, because “we realized, if we worked on a project like this, we could really make a change.” The team’s modeling also takes into account traffic growth around the interchange leading up to the rebuild in 2023, and the fix still works, said ALEX HARE. “We wouldn’t want to make a project that fixes stuff today but five years from now is completely irrelevant,” she said. “It fixes what we wanted to focus on and really makes a difference in this location.”
PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
PHOTO: GOOGLE
The team was one of 13 civil and environmental engineering groups that presented their senior design projects at the spring expo. Projects included site designs, wastewater treatment projects, multi-use trail designs for the PATH Foundation, and other transportation redesigns.
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CONNECTING PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
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PROJECT WILL LAY A MATHEMATICAL FOUNDATION FOR CLOAKING STRUCTURES
THE DOTS Vanishing act
Can you hide a building from a stress wave, like an earthquake or even some kind of blast or explosion? If that kind of “cloaking” were possible, it could shape how we design critical structures like nuclear power plants. ARASH YAVARI has started a new four-year, half-million dollar federally funded project with Ph.D. student ASHKAN GOLGOON to lay the mathematical foundations for that kind of technology and explore if it’s theoretically possible while still respecting the laws of physics. “I’m trying to see if there is hope to realize such a cloak in the world we live in,” said Yavari, a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and an expert in geometric mechanics and nonlinear elasticity. “This project, right now, is more than 90 percent, or 95 percent, theoretical. But then, it’s not about an imaginary problem.” Here’s how to think of what cloaking could achieve: Imagine a solid square of land. When you introduce some kind of deformation or strain, engineers understand how the resulting stress wave will travel through the land. Now imagine a similar square of land with a hole in the middle. That hole changes how the stress wave will travel. Yavari’s project aims to design a cloak so that the stress wave moves through the land with the hole exactly the same way as the solid land with no hole. It would be as though the hole didn’t exist. If that’s possible, then that hole could instead be a building or other structure that would be protected from the wave moving through the surrounding area. In fact, it wouldn’t interact with the wave at all. Perhaps that could be achieved with some sort of engineered cloaking material — using what Yavari said are sometimes called “metamaterials” — or maybe it would be a new design or construction technique. Designing the cloak itself comes later. Yavari is working to understand whether it’s possible in the first place. The idea of cloaking has been discussed in the scientific literature in the past 10 years or so, but Yavari said many of the studies so far have conceptual flaws. “There are a lot of numerical simulations in the literature that people are very excited about, but they are not real, in the sense that the balance of angular momentum is violated,” he said. “They’re showing you things that cannot happen in this world. One contribution of our work will be to clean the literature a little bit.” PROFESSOR ARASH YAVARI HAS SET OUT ON A FEDERALLY FUNDED PROJECT TO ESTABLISH WHETHER IT’S POSSIBLE TO CLOAK A BUILDING.
Our research IT’S NO SURPRISE to anyone who’s been paying attention that the world faces significant challenges in the decades ahead. Growing population, a changing climate, radical advances in technology, crumbling or inadequate infrastructure, to name but a few.
For our students and scientists, however, the exciting and energizing reality is that many of the solutions to these and other global issues will come from the civil and environmental engineers who are today learning, working and leading in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. To answer the call of service from our global society, we think beyond the traditional boundaries between civil and environmental engineering disciplines, embracing new ideas, new collaborations, new sources of inspiration, and new areas of inquiry. The result is work that develops new knowledge, technology and innovations, and ultimately, invents a future where our global society thrives. MORE DETAILS: CE.GATECH.EDU/ANNUALREPORT
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THE DOWNTOWN CONNECTOR — A 7.5-MILE JOINING OF INTERSTATES 75 AND 85 — STRETCHING NORTHWARD THROUGH MIDTOWN ATLANTA.
Automated assessments An automated system using 3D lasers and artificial intelligence could save time and money for transportation departments around the country while improving the conditions of our roads.
Developed by Georgia Tech and Georgia Department of Transportation researchers, the system has such potential that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials named the project one of its “Sweet Sixteen” high-value projects for 2017. The research, led by School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor JAMES TSAI, tested an automated system for detecting pavement conditions and cataloging signage along Georgia’s interstates. Tsai said the system safely and more consistently detects cracks, ruts, potholes and other pavement issues without interfering with traffic on the state’s busy highways. It also collects data on roadside signs. “An automated system for smart infrastructure health condition evaluation is urgently needed for transportation agencies,” Tsai said. “The extracted data, including cracking, rutting, raveling, and more, are essential to support officials’ decision-making regarding the right time, right location, and right method for maintenance and rehabilitation of aged infrastructure.” He said it has taken two decades for technology to mature enough that such an automated system works consistently. “The successful implementation of an automated system on a large interstate highway in this research has set an important milestone for an intelligent infrastructure asset management method,” Tsai said. “The developed technology will benefit GDOT and transportation agencies throughout the U.S. and the world.”
NATIONAL GROUP HONORS RESEARCH USING LASERS AND AI TO AUTOMATICALLY ASSESS HEALTH OF HIGHWAY PAVEMENT AND CATALOG ROAD SIGNS
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Healthy skies, healthy people
STUDY SHOWS AIR QUALITY AND HEALTH IMPROVED IN METRO ATLANTA AFTER POWER PLANT AND MOTOR VEHICLE POLLUTION CONTROLS
Do air pollution control measures actually work? A study published in April says yes.
With the support of the Health Effects Institute, ARMISTEAD “TED” RUSSELL and colleagues from Georgia Tech and Emory University examined whether state and national regulations targeting power plants and mobile sources were effective in reducing pollutant emissions, improving air quality, and ultimately improving health in the Atlanta area.
“One of the real strengths of this study was that it truly combined the engineering expertise at Georgia Tech with the public health expertise at Emory to do a very detailed accounting of how regulations impact air quality and health.”
Their report for the institute finds that air quality improved substantially — and fewer people visited hospital emergency departments as a result. Although regulators assume air quality actions will improve air quality and health, once adopted, there are few studies that actually test whether that’s true. “The atmosphere is very complex, and we were able to use our research tools developed for atmospheric science and engineering studies to help answer pressing public health questions,” said Russell, the Howard T. Tellepsen Chair and a Regents professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “The result was a one-of-a kind analysis showing the effectiveness of specific regulations at each step of the process.” Using an innovative approach, Russell and his colleagues compared the actual conditions from 1999 to 2013 with carefully estimated quantitative projections of emissions, air quality and emergency department visits that likely would have occurred in the absence of six national- and state-level regulatory programs. The investigators found that air pollutant emissions and ambient concentrations decreased over the study period for most pollutants and estimated that the pollutant levels were lower than what would have been expected without regulatory actions.
PHOTO: FITRAH HAMID
Their analysis also found that the observed improvements in air quality were associated with fewer emergency department visits for asthma and other respiratory disease compared with what would have been expected without the regulations. And their data suggested that the benefits increased over time as the air pollution control measures were fully implemented and emissions went down. “One of the real strengths of this study was that it truly combined the engineering expertise at Georgia Tech with the public health expertise at Emory to do a very detailed accounting of how regulations impact air quality and health,” Russell said.
MORE DETAILS: CE.GATECH.EDU/ANNUALREPORT
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Total recall
Almost 70 years later, the man remembered the August day in Playa Rincon, when he clung to the top of an almond tree to survive a tsunami where the waters rushed about 700 meters (2,300 feet) inland after a magnitude 8.1 earthquake. His recollections and other eyewitness accounts of the tsunami that struck the Dominican Republic in 1946 allowed School of Civil and Environmental Engineering researcher HERMANN FRITZ to reconstruct the tsunami’s heights and inundation distances. He presented the work at the 2018 Seismological Society of America Annual Meeting. Fritz and his colleagues carried out the eyewitness surveys in 2014 and 2016, hoping to learn more about one of the strongest earthquakes ever reported in the Caribbean. The 1946 tsunami was detected by tide gauges as far away as Atlantic City, New Jersey. The 1946 quake suggests that earthquakes along the region’s Hispaniola and Puerto Rico trench subduction zones “pose a significant tsunami hazard not just for the islands themselves, but these events are also relevant for the seaboard of the eastern United States,” Fritz said.
PHOTO: STAFF SGT. DANIEL J. MARTINEZ, U.S. AIR NATIONAL GUARD
The 2010 magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti prompted Fritz and others to look more closely at the Dominican Republic’s tsunami potential. The eyewitness surveys covered about 300 kilometers (186 miles) of observations along the Dominican Republic’s north coast, allowing the researchers to make 29 runup and tsunami height measurements at 21 locations. Locations between Cabrera and El Limón took the brunt of the waves, with tsunami heights over 5 meters (16 feet). The tsunami flooded inland at distances of 600 meters (1,970 feet) or more in some places. Although much of the coast has been changed by erosion, the researchers were able to find eyewitnesses who could remember where the water reached during the midday event. In the town of Matanza, for instance, the survey team spoke with a woman who was a teenager when the tsunami came ashore. “We went to the beach with her where there was a palm tree that had survived the tsunami, and she was able to show us, using the tree, how high the tsunami was at that location,” Fritz said. “I was surprised by interviewing these people, how lucid some of these accounts were. It almost brought the tsunami event back to life.” —Becky Ham
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EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS FILL IN DETAILS OF 1946 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC TSUNAMI PHOTO COURTESY: HERMANN FRITZ
IMAGE COURTESY: RACHEL SAMUELS
Silence to sound LOOKING AT TWITTER POSTS FROM 2017’S HURRICANE HARVEY SHOWS LACK OF ACTIVITY CAN TELL FIRST RESPONDERS WHERE TROUBLE’S BREWING
When Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston in 2017, many residents turned to social media to cry out for help. Other people stopped posting altogether. Researchers in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering are working on a tool to help first-responders understand both of those changes in Twitter activity and use it to identify developing crises after a storm. It’s the result of a grant from the National Science Foundation, which was looking for ways to learn from Harvey. Led by Frederick Law Olmsted Professor JOHN E. TAYLOR, one of the interesting results of the team’s work was that a lack of activity can be just as instructive as people asking for help.
ABOVE: FLOODWATERS COVER PORT ARTHUR, TEXAS, ON AUGUST 31, 2017, SIX DAYS AFTER HURRICANE HARVEY CAME ASHORE. STAFF SGT. DANIEL J. MARTINEZ TOOK THIS PHOTO FROM A SOUTH CAROLINA HELICOPTER AQUATIC RESCUE TEAM UH-60 BLACK HAWK HELICOPTER DURING RESCUE OPERATIONS FOLLOWING THE STORM. ABOVE RIGHT: A HEXAGON GRID OVERLAYING HOUSTON SHOWS THE CHANGE IN TWITTER ACTIVITY THE DAY FOLLOWING HURRICANE HARVEY’S LANDFALL IN AUGUST 2017, WITH DARKER RED HEXAGONS INDICATING HIGH LEVELS OF DEVIATION. PH.D STUDENT RACHEL SAMUELS IS WORKING WITH JOHN E. TAYLOR ON A NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION PROJECT TO USE TWITTER ACTIVITY TO HELP FIRST-RESPONDERS IDENTIFY DEVELOPING CRISES AFTER A STORM WHILE ALSO HELPING CIVILIANS MORE EFFECTIVELY PLUG INTO DISASTER RESPONSE EFFORTS. LEFT: CLAUDIO MARTINEZ FROM THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC’S OFICINA NACIONAL DE METEOROLOGIA IN MATANCITAS WITH LOCAL RESIDENT PATRIA, RIGHT, WHO TOOK MARTINEZ AND GEORGIA TECH’S HERMANN FRITZ BACK TO THE SITE OF A 1946 TSUNAMI IN THE AREA. PATRIA REMEMBERED HOW HIGH WATERS HAD REACHED AT THIS PALM TREE, HELPING THE TEAM RECONSTRUCT THE TSUNAMI’S IMPACTS MORE THAN SEVEN DECADES AFTER IT HAPPENED.
“Obviously, where people who are in trouble have explicitly said, ‘I’m in trouble,’ that’s critical to respond to,” Taylor said. “But an important secondary predictor is, what about areas where people are saying nothing where they were [posting] before?” “How do we hear the silence?” is how Taylor’s Ph.D. student RACHEL SAMUELS put it. She presented the work at a big disaster conference earlier this year. “How do we turn silence into sound?” Using posts on the micro-blogging site has been done before by researchers who match spikes of activity to infrastructure damage, Samuels said. “What we found that it missed are these data shadows, where areas that don’t have any Twitter activity at all are also being damaged.” That’s where the team’s new software tool will come in. Using tweets tagged with users’ locations, their system can assess the sentiments people express, identify trending topics in localized areas, and also note where activity has dropped off significantly from normal — all in the service of helping emergency workers better identify where they need to deploy their resources. The tool also can help civilians more effectively plug into disaster response efforts — a key feature for Samuels, who was impressed by the hundreds of people who brought boats and bodies to help in Houston after the hurricane. Taylor said the system will be useful in other large disasters like an earthquake, where problems develop in the immediate aftermath of the initial event. “This is about identifying smaller crises happening within a much larger crisis,” he said. “There are dangers within this larger, monolithic thing like an earthquake or a hurricane. We need to take advantage of emerging data streams to find those in danger and get help to where help is needed.” MORE DETAILS: CE.GATECH.EDU/ANNUALREPORT
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RESEARCH UNCOVERING A NEW OIL-EATING MICROBE WINS ACCOLADES AT GULF OIL SPILL CONFERENCE
The oil eaters A previously unnoticed family of oil-degrading bacteria could help accelerate cleanup efforts after oil spills without the need for adding potentially harmful nitrogen sources to fouled beaches, according to School of Civil and Environmental Engineering researchers. Working with Professor KOSTAS KONSTANTINIDIS, Ph.D. student SMRUTHI KARTHIKEYAN helped discover the bacteria, which is ubiquitous in oil-contaminated sand and soil but almost nonexistent in clean sediments. “It appears that this microbe belongs to a new family of keystone oil degraders that has gone unnoticed so far and, thus, it could represent a new model organism for oil bioremediation efforts,” said Karthikeyan, whose work earned her a top research award from scientists studying the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The researchers used cutting-edge genomic techniques to identify all the organisms in sand collected along Pensacola Beach in the Florida Panhandle, one of the areas where oil came ashore after the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April 2010. Karthikeyan said they couldn’t detect the microbe in clean sand, but it made up roughly 30 percent of all microbes in contaminated areas, “which is quite remarkable for beach sands.” Another interesting twist: this particular microbe didn’t require a nitrogen source like fertilizer, which is often added to contaminated soil to boost bioremediation efforts but has potentially harmful effects for the surrounding environment. “We found that this metabolically versatile bacteria not only possessed the genes required to feast on oil, but could also fix its own nitrogen from the atmosphere, thereby eliminating the need to add any fertilizer or the like,” Karthikeyan said. The discovery won Karthikeyan the James D. Watkins Student Award for Excellence in Research at the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill & Ecosystem Science Conference, a gathering of hundreds of researchers, site managers and industry representatives studying the 2010 spill. “The [Deepwater Horizon] event had a significant impact on various facets of the environment,” she said, “and the power of microbes in cleaning up oil spills could have great impacts in natural restoration of the ecosystem.”
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Going rogue A new analysis supporting the investigation into the 2015 sinking of the El Faro cargo ship has calculated the likelihood of a massive rogue wave during Hurricane Joaquin in October of that year — and demonstrated a new technique for evaluating the probability of rogue waves over space and time. Using weather and sea data from the time of the sinking, along with a new theoretical model, a School of Civil and Environmental Engineering researcher has calculated that there was as much as a one-in-130 chance — over a period of time and area — that a rogue wave 46 feet high could have occurred during the hurricane. The research, reported in September in the journal Scientific Reports, may help improve the prediction of rogue waves to help shipping companies and others understand the risks posed by these unusual wave patterns. “Hurricanes produce very extreme conditions with strong winds, so you have very energetic sea states that can increase the probability of these events,” said FRANCESCO FEDELE, an associate professor in the School. “We believe this first study of rogue waves occurring over space and time during hurricanes will help improve real-time forecasting for shipping companies and other organizations that need to understand the risk of extreme events in the oceans.” The container ship El Faro was bound for Puerto Rico from Jacksonville, Florida, ahead of Hurricane Joaquin when it sank east of the Bahamas, killing all 33 crew members. The rogue wave study was done for the National Transportation Safety Board as part of the agency’s investigation into the disaster. Rogue ocean waves can develop seemingly out of nowhere to sink ships and overwhelm oil platforms with walls of water as much as 25 meters (82 feet) high. Fedele and his colleagues have studied rogue waves for several years, and in 2016 used advanced mathematical techniques to develop a new understanding of how the waves form. After the El Faro sinking, the NTSB asked Fedele to evaluate the probability that a rogue wave could have occurred during the hurricane when the ship sank while drifting in violent seas after losing engine power. Key to the new prediction technique is accounting for space-time effects that can increase the likelihood of a ship encountering a rogue wave.
ROGUE WAVE ANALYSIS SUPPORTS INVESTIGATION OF THE EL FARO SINKING
PHOTO: FLICKR USER AXIRAA (ANITA)
“A ship moving along a navigation route covers more space-time area, increasing the probability that it would encounter a large wave,” Fedele said. “We simulated the ocean state at the time of the sinking, and to that we added predictions of the ocean conditions. We did wave simulations based on those to understand the kind of conditions the ship encountered.” —John Toon
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FAR BELOW THE EARTH’S SURFACE, HOT ROCKS COMBINE WITH WATER TO CREATE CLEAN POWER SHENG DAI HOLDS A COLLECTION OF ROCK SAMPLES IN HIS LAB.
Earth energy In the next two decades, the world faces a yawning gap in the energy we produce and the energy we consume. Estimated at more than 4 terawatts — that’s 4 trillion watts — it’s a gap equivalent to 10,000 times the output of Hoover Dam. The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s SHENG DAI is working with the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy on one of the renewable sources that could help us make up ground: geothermal energy. “I suspect that deep geothermal energy is going to make a big impact on the state of clean energy,” said Dai, an assistant professor and geotechnical engineer in the School. “Long term, it’s more environmentally friendly and efficient, plus it doesn’t rely on other environmental factors. For instance, with solar energy, you’ll have low energy output if it’s overcast or dusty.” Dai’s research takes a two-pronged approach to geothermal energy. On one hand is shallow geothermal to efficiently heat and cool buildings. Deep geothermal energy — starting about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) below the earth’s surface — would generate clean, renewable energy on a larger scale. “The rock temperature is very high at 3 to 5 kilometers below the earth’s surface. Some may be above 300 degrees Celsius,” Dai said. “First, you drill down and fracture the rock bed, creating a permeable network. Then water — or any working fluid that produces vapor — flashes through the reservoir to create steam, which is used to generate electricity by powering a turbine.” With the support of the NSF and the Energy Department, Dai uses a set of unprecedented tools to test geomaterials at high temperatures and pressures in the search for ways to harness the potential of geothermal energy. The instruments are proprietary to Georgia Tech; Dai spent a good deal of his Ph.D. building the tools, and no other labs across the country have access to similar technology. Dai said he hopes to use them on a new testing site the Department of Energy has identified in Utah, characterizing the area’s material in the lab to assess its viability for producing geothermal energy. “We are pretty far from commercializing geothermal energy,” Dai said. “There are still a lot of unknowns — we don’t have data on how geomaterials will behave 3 to 5 kilometers down. We also have to consider the long-term effects of running water into the ground and how the rocks will respond.” Yet the need is great, he said. “The magnitude of energy needed to power our daily lives is tremendous,” he said, “and there is no one energy source that can solve this problem. If we don’t look to other sources of energy, we won’t be able to keep pace with global energy needs.” —Georgia Parmelee
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Shelf life
XING XIE has been developing a new environmental sampling technique that he thinks could have an unexpected application: preserving biological samples for transport to diagnostic facilities.
PHOTOS: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
XING XIE IS DEVELOPING SUPERABSORBENT POLYMER BEADS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SAMPLING. THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION HAS FUNDED AN EXPLORATORY PROJECT TO USE THE BEADS TO PRESERVE BIOLOGICAL SAMPLES FOR TRANSPORT TO TESTING LABS.
The Grand Challenges Explorations Initiative at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation agreed, and has funded an exploratory project to see if Xie’s idea works. If it sounds more like biomedical engineering than environmental engineering, well, maybe it is. But it has the potential to significantly improve diagnostic test results in far-flung places. The idea is to protect DNA or viruses in the samples from degradation during transport. Xie, a Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has proposed using super-absorbent polymer beads to target molecules in blood, urine, saliva or other biological material, and lock them away for shipping. “The problem is, usually there’s a long distance between the point of collection or final care to the clinic, and they have to take the samples back to the clinic for diagnosis,” said Xie, whose work blends environmental engineering, materials science and microbiology. “I’ve been thinking about using these kinds of beads to take environmental samples, but I don’t think I’d been thinking about, say, blood samples before. When I looked at this call for ideas from Grand Challenges Explorations, I thought, ‘Oh, that could be a good way to go.’”
EXTENDING THE SHELF LIFE OF BIOLOGICAL SAMPLES TO IMPROVE DIAGNOSTIC TEST RESULTS AROUND THE GLOBE
Xie’s beads would grab DNA or a virus from liquid samples and allow contaminating bacteria or other cells to simply be poured away. Add in a pH buffer and preservatives, and the sample can travel to the lab undisturbed, offering reliable test results and diagnosis. Xie is one of 35 researchers selected for the Gates Foundation’s 20th round of Grand Challenges Explorations grants, a worldwide initiative to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Researchers had to present a bold idea in one of three critical global health and development topic areas, including innovations for diagnostics systems. Xie said the super-absorbent polymer is widely available. It’s the same kind of material used in diapers or in flower vases. The beads are inexpensive, and they can absorb up to 1,000 times their weight or more. He proposed using extremely small beads — roughly a fifth of a millimeter — which means they can absorb liquids very quickly, he said. “We need to modify the bead materials a little bit, depending on what the target is,” Xie said. “We can tune the pore size of these beads to determine whether the target molecules can go into the beads or be excluded from the beads. That will be a focus of our phase one study.”
TOP: A DRY SAP BEAD ROUGLY 500 MICROMETERS IN DIAMETER. THESE BEADS CAN ABSORB WATER AND GROW TO ABOUT 100 TIMES THEIR SIZE, AS SHOWN ON THE GLOVED FINGER IN THE MIDDLE PHOTO. BOTTOM: A SAMPLE OF THE BEADS XIE IS DEVELOPING. HE HAS ALREADY CREATED EVEN SMALLER VERSIONS THAT CAN GROW 200-500 TIMES THEIR SIZE.
“In the end, we just want to demonstrate the idea.” The Grand Challenges Explorations grants are designed to accelerate development of innovations, funding high-risk, high-reward proposals twice a year. If Xie’s idea works as he expects, he can pursue a $1 million follow up grant from the foundation. MORE DETAILS: CE.GATECH.EDU/ANNUALREPORT
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Waste in the water Water researchers from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering will lead a three-year effort to understand how septic systems in Gwinnett County, Georgia, impact Lake Lanier. The massive reservoir northeast of Atlanta serves as a drinking water supply for the county as well as the metro area.
GEORGIA WATER RESOURCES INSTITUTE LEADS EFFORT TO UNDERSTAND HOW RESIDENTIAL SEPTIC SYSTEMS IMPACT LAKE LANIER WATER QUALITY
“Our work will include several interlinked components, including comprehensive surface and groundwater monitoring and development of advanced modeling tools to assess water quality,” said ARIS GEORGAKAKOS, director of the Georgia Water Resources Institute and a professor in the School. “These data and models will allow us to characterize current conditions in the lake and understand how the lake water quality will improve under remedial actions we may recommend.” Georgakakos, the lead researcher, said the study will generate new data and assessment tools that researchers and other utilities will be able to use for other lakes in Georgia and elsewhere. He will work with experts from the University of Georgia, Cornell University, and the U.S. Geological Survey. “This research will provide data to help us better understand water quality in the lake and what can be done to continue to improve it,” said J.C. Lan, deputy director for engineering and technical services for the Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources. According to a county news release: “The Georgia Environmental Protection Division has recently proposed a Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL, for nutrients in Lake Lanier. These nutrients include phosphorus and nitrogen. The research will help Gwinnett assess which strategies may help reduce this nutrient loading, and provide a model the county and EPD can use to predict lake response to remedial actions.”
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LAKE LANIER NORTHWEST OF ATLANTA, A MAJOR SOURCE OF DRINKING WATER FOR THE METRO AREA. THE SCHOOL’S GEORGIA WATER RESOURCES INSTITUTE IS LEADING A PROJECT TO UNDERSTAND HOW RESIDENTIAL SEPTIC SYSTEMS IN ONE OF THE LAKE’S BORDERING COMMUNITIES AFFECT WATER QUALITY.
Poultry pathogens A group of Georgia Tech researchers has received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to better understand how poultry feeding operations in Georgia potentially introduce antibioticresistant pathogens into the nearby environment. It’s an important relationship to understand, according to principal investigator JOE BROWN, because surface water provides a key source of drinking water for millions of residents. It’s also particularly relevant in Georgia, where poultry production accounts for more than half of the state’s agricultural output and more broiler chickens are grown than any other state.
The problem is dire — Brown said it’s among the greatest current threats to public health. This grant will help fill gaps in scientific knowledge as part of the CDC’s Antibiotic-Resistance Solutions Initiative, an effort to combat antibiotic resistance and protect human health. Brown’s team will collect samples at five poultry feeding operations, looking for antibiotic-resistance genes and resistant pathogens in the animals’ waste, soil where the waste has been used as fertilizer, and in waters nearby and downstream from the feeding operation. “Specific impacts of antibiotic use in these concentrated animal feeding operations on water quality downstream of farms has not been well characterized,” Brown said. “This research will help us measure these risks and evaluate potential opportunities to limit exposure.” Post-doctoral researcher DAVID BERENDES said the work will be among the first to combine microbial and chemical analyses to detect resistance genes and pathogens as well as evaluate downstream impacts within the same poultry farm system.
PHOTO: LUKE XINJING XU
CDC-SPONSORED RESEARCH SEEKS TO UNDERSTAND WATER-RELATED RISKS OF ANTIBIOTIC USE IN AGRICULTURE
“We hope this research will result in a better understanding of some of the positive benefits of limiting antibiotics on farms,” Brown said, noting the drugs are commonly given to poultry to increase growth rates. Such widespread use has been linked to the growth of so-called “superbugs” that are resistant to common antibiotics.
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INTERSTATES 75 AND 85 ADJACENT TO GEORGIA TECH’S CAMPUS AND MIDTOWN ATLANTA.
Traffic tech
PHOTO: LUKE XINJING XU
PHOTO: ROB FELT
The day is coming — perhaps not even that far into the future — when most cars on the road will communicate with each other. They’ll share information with the traffic signals and ramp meters they encounter. Some of those cars will be driving themselves. Roads will be packed with sensors. And wireless technology means we’ll be able to collect mountains of data every second in real time. Couple all of that with the reality that we’ve more or less maxed out our roadway infrastructure and the result is what SAMUEL COOGAN calls an unprecedented opportunity to reshape how we operate our transportation systems. “The sheer amount of data we’re getting — quickly we’re not going to be able to synthesize it on a human scale,” said Coogan, an assistant professor in both the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His idea is to build the mathematical foundations for new models of traffic flow that process all of these new data streams and can offer new ways to control our transportation systems automatically. Then, he’ll use techniques from computer science to prove that they work, so they’re guaranteed to deliver the results they predict.
PHOTO: LUKE XINJING XU ATLANTA’S MERCEDES-BENZ STADIUM. RANDALL GUENSLER AND MICHAEL HUNTER WILL USE DATA FROM THE CITY’S NORTH AVENUE SMART CORRIDOR AND A SMARTPHONE APP TO IMPROVE TRAFFIC-SIGNAL TIMING AND DRIVER ROUTING DECISIONS AFTER BIG EVENTS AT THE STADIUM, SUCH AS NFL, MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER AND COLLEGE FOOTBALL BOWL GAMES.
“How can I provably, correctly say that the system is going to behave in a reasonable way? There’s this huge gap between taking these techniques, which exist in this computer science world, and applying them to the physical systems that exist in the physical world,” Coogan said. With the support of a National Science Foundation Early Career Development award, Coogan will spend the next five years working to bridge that gap, applying what computer scientists call formal methods to transportation network control systems. Traditionally, these methods are used to verify that a piece of software or hardware works correctly. Coogan will use them to prove his new models work. “If we can break this code,” he said,” there’s a lot of promise to have automatic deployment of algorithms and techniques to physical control systems.” “There’s a fundamental underlying mathematics driven by the physics here. Having the right models for this, being able to say something guaranteed — it’s important, because it takes the human subjectivity out of traffic control decisions.”
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BUILDING A MATHEMATICAL FOUNDATION TO MODEL AND PREDICT TRAFFIC FLOW
Smart streets The City of Atlanta unveiled in September 2017 what officials call the most-connected corridor in Georgia. They also said it’s a living laboratory for traffic management, making it a prime opportunity for School of Civil and Environmental Engineering researchers to better understand traffic and travel behavior — and to improve lives. “All the detection in the world, who cares if you’re not turning it into something actionable?” said MICHAEL HUNTER, one of the researchers leading the effort. “We’re gathering data, but how do we use that data to improve the quality of life?”
ENERGY, EMISSIONS AND A SMARTER NORTH AVENUE: DATA FROM NEW SMART CORRIDOR TO IMPROVE TRAFFIC, SAFETY
ABOVE: AN EASYMILE EZ10 BATTERY-POWERED AUTONOMOUS BUS WAITS FOR RIDERS AT THE NORTH AVENUE SMART CORRIDOR DEMONSTRATION PROJECT LAUNCH AT PONCE CITY MARKET IN ATLANTA.
“The corridor is intended to demonstrate all of the ways that technology can connect us, in particular from a transportation perspective,” said Faye DiMassimo, general manager of Renew Atlanta, the city’s infrastructure bond program. “In some way, shape or form, all of the technology features of the corridor contribute to a safer experience as well as enhanced mobility.” A partnership between the city, the Georgia Department of Transportation, Georgia Tech and others, the corridor stretches between Midtown and Downtown Atlanta. It has cameras; datacollecting road sensors; and modern, adaptive traffic lights that exchange information with each other and vehicles traveling the road. Currently, most smart city traffic research focuses on travel time, because it’s a challenge that drivers experience every day. One piece that’s missing, according to Hunter, is energy use and emissions. He’s using data collected from connected vehicles, road sensors and other sources to understand the impact of traffic signal timing and driver behavior on both. “On any one car, that may only be a small number of gallons saved. However, when you look at that day after day over a year, you might start seeing some significant energy savings,” Hunter said. In addition to analyzing the North Avenue data, RANDALL GUENSLER is leading an effort within the project that collects data through an app his lab developed called Commute Warrior. It runs in the background of a user’s smartphone and monitors walking, biking, vehicle trips and other travel activity. Researchers use the data to study travel behavior. Hunter and Guensler will utilize this trip data to improve signal timing and driver routing decisions during special events, like Atlanta Falcons or Atlanta United games. The goal is to provide more predictive information and incentivize a change in drivers’ behavior. As Hunter put it: “If you leave 15 minutes later or a half hour earlier, what would be the difference in energy use, emissions, or travel time?” —Alyson Powell
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Timber for troops FOREST SERVICE FUNDS PROJECT USING GEORGIA TIMBER FOR STRONGER ARMY BARRACKS
The timber industry, the U.S. Military Academy, U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are teaming with Georgia Tech to design and build better portable housing for overseas troops. With support from the United States Forestry Service, LAUREN STEWART and RUSSELL GENTRY will explore ways to utilize new laminated wood products in the construction of temporary barracks. They saw the products — called crosslaminated timber, or CLT — as an ideal material for the shortterm structures while creating a new market for Georgia’s timber industry, the largest in the country. “With 22 million acres of working forests and a $32 billion economic impact, Georgia is blessed to be the number one forestry state in the nation,” said Andres Villegas, president and CEO of the Georgia Forestry Association. “That’s why we at the Georgia Forestry Association are fully supportive of the research that Georgia Tech is doing with cross-laminated timber through the USDA’s Wood Innovation Grant.” The Forest Service was looking for new uses of the CLT products, a wood panel typically consisting of three, five, or seven layers of lumber oriented at right angles to one another and then glued together. “This project is a unique opportunity to bring together the [forest service], state agencies, military and academia to advance the state of knowledge of CLT, promote forest health, and develop an application that can enhance troops’ safety, security and comfort,” said Stewart, the project’s principal investigator and an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The United States Department of Defense spent more than $150 million over the past five years to design lightweight bunkers, or “b-huts,” for troops, which were an improvement from the tents typically used in combat. Georgia Tech is proposing CLT as a way to make the barracks more durable. The proposed designs use less energy for heating and cooling, and the bunker will be far easier to disassemble and relocate.
CLT has the potential for broader applications, too, as more and more designers look for low-carbon alternatives to traditional construction materials. Hotels, mid- and high-rise buildings, and other projects around the country already have been using wood products. —Jonathan Bowers
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PHOTO: LUKE XINJING XU
Both are key attributes for military housing, along with providing adequate protection for troops.
Fast folds Researchers in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering have developed a new computer-aided approach that streamlines the design process for origami-based structures, making it easier for engineers and scientists to conceptualize new ideas graphically while simultaneously generating the underlying mathematical data needed to build the structure in the real world.
PAPER MODELS OF VARIOUS ORIGAMI STRUCTURES AND FOLDS. BOTTOM: RESEARCHERS GLAUCIO PAULINO, LEFT, AND KE LIU WITH ORIGAMI STRUCTURES THAT CAN BE SIMULATED IN THEIR NEW SOFTWARE.
Origami paper folding techniques in recent years have been at the center of research efforts focused on finding practical engineering applications for the ancient art, with ideas ranging from deployable antennas to robotic arms. “Our work provides a means to predict, computationally, the real origami behavior of a design — something that up to now has not been easily done,” said GLAUCIO PAULINO, Raymond Allen Jones Chair. “With the new software, we can easily visualize and, most importantly, engineer the behavior of deployable, self-assembling and adaptable origami systems.”
NEW SOFTWARE SPEEDS ORIGAMI STRUCTURE DESIGNS
The research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and reported in October in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, involved building a computer model to simulate the interaction between the two facets of a folded sheet, including how easily and how far the folds would bend and how much the flat planes would deform during movement. Once all sections were connected together and digitally represented a piece of origami, the model could simulate how the structure would behave based on what type of material would be used to create the object from soft paper, to hard plastic or metal.
“With the new software, we can easily visualize and, most importantly, engineer the behavior of deployable, self-assembling, and adaptable origami systems.”
PHOTOS: ROB FELT
“This type of modeling was possible already using finite element analysis, but that is a time-consuming process that could take hours or days and provides a lot of unnecessary data,” said KE LIU, a Georgia Tech graduate student who worked on the project. “Our new process is much faster and gives us the underlying data for how the origami works.” —Josh Brown
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OUR FACULTY ADJO A. AMEKUDZI-KENNEDY
Associate Chair for Global Engineering Leadership and Research Development & Professor Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University
SUSAN E. BURNS
Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs & Georgia Power Distinguished Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology YONGSHENG CHEN
MUSTAFA M. ARAL
Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology CHLOÉ ARSON
Associate Professor Ph.D., École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées BAABAK ASHURI
Associate Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology NELSON C. BAKER
Dean of Professional Education & Associate Professor Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University RUDOLPH BONAPARTE
Professor of the Practice Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley RAFAEL L. BRAS
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs & K. Harrison Brown Family Chair Sc.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology JOE BROWN
Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
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Professor Ph.D., Nankai University
J. DAVID FROST
Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor Ph.D., Purdue University LAURIE A. GARROW
Professor Ph.D., Northwestern University ARIS P. GEORGAKAKOS
Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin
Director, Georgia Water Resources Institute & Professor Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
SAMUEL D. COOGAN
BARRY J. GOODNO
YONG K. CHO
Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Professor Ph.D., Stanford University RANDALL L. GUENSLER
JOHN CRITTENDEN
Director, Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, Hightower Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Environmental Technologies & Professor Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor SHENG DAI
Assistant Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology
Professor Ph.D., University of California, Davis KEVIN A. HAAS
Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Delaware CHING-HUA HUANG
Professor Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University HAIYING HUANG
Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Minnesota
FRANCESCO FEDELE
Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Vermont HERMANN M. FRITZ
Professor Ph.D., Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
MICHAEL P. HUNTER
Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin LAURENCE J. JACOBS
College of Engineering Associate Dean for Academic Affairs & Professor Ph.D., Columbia University
KOSTAS T. KONSTANTINIDIS
Carlton S. Wilder Associate Professor Ph.D., Michigan State University JOHN H. KOON
Professor of the Practice Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley KIMBERLY E. KURTIS
College of Engineering Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Scholarship & Professor Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley JORGE A. LAVAL
Associate Professor Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley JIAN LUO
Associate Professor Ph.D., Stanford University ERIC D. MARKS
Professor of the Practice Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology PAUL W. MAYNE
Professor Ph.D., Cornell University PATRICIA L. MOKHTARIAN
Susan G. and Christopher D. Pappas Professor Ph.D., Northwestern University RAFI L. MUHANNA
Associate Professor Ph.D., Higher Institute for Structure and Architecture Sofia, Bulgaria
JAMES A. MULHOLLAND
Associate Chair for Graduate Programs & Professor Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology GLAUCIO H. PAULINO
Raymond Allen Jones Chair & Professor Ph.D., Cornell University
JOHN E. TAYLOR
Frederick Law Olmsted Professor Ph.D., Stanford University IRIS TIEN
Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley YI-CHANG JAMES TSAI
Professor Ph.D., Cornell University
Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology
LISA G. ROSENSTEIN
JINGFENG WANG
SPYROS G. PAVLOSTATHIS
Senior Academic Professional Ph.D., Emory University ARMISTEAD G. RUSSELL
Howard T. Tellepsen Chair & Regents Professor Ph.D., California Institute of Technology DAVID W. SCOTT
Associate Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology
Associate Professor Sc.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology YANG WANG
Associate Professor Ph.D., Stanford University KARI E. WATKINS
Frederick Law Olmsted Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Washington DONALD R. WEBSTER
SOTIRA YIACOUMI
A D J U N C T F A C U LT Y
ABDUL-HAMID ZUREICK
DANIEL CASTRO KEVIN D. CLARK REGINALD DESROCHES JON DRYSDALE MAOHONG FAN
Professor Ph.D., Syracuse University Professor Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
EMERITUS FACULTY G. WAYNE CLOUGH
President Emeritus Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley BRUCE R. ELLINGWOOD
Professor Emeritus Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign LAWRENCE F. KAHN
Professor Emeritus Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor JAMES LAI
Professor Emeritus Ph.D., Brown University
Karen and John Huff School Chair & Professor Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
PHILIP J. ROBERTS
Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of California, San Diego MARC STIEGLITZ
DONALD W. WHITE
F. MICHAEL SAUNDERS
TERRY W. STURM
XING XIE
LAUREN K. STEWART
Associate Professor Ph.D., Columbia University Professor Ph.D., University of Iowa PHANISH SURYANARAYANA
Associate Professor Ph.D., California Institute of Technology
Professor Ph.D., Cornell University Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor Ph.D., Stanford University ARASH YAVARI
Professor Ph.D., California Institute of Technology
T. RUSSELL GENTRY JOSEPH HUGHES ROBERTO LEON JOHN D. LEONARD JOHN Z. LUH GLENN RIX CATHERINE ROSS J. CARLOS SANTAMARINA FRANK SOUTHWORTH COSTAS TSOURIS AMBARISH VAIDYANATHAN ROGER WAYSON
Professor Emeritus Ph.D., California Institute of Technology Professor Emeritus Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign JIM C. SPAIN
Professor Emeritus Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin KENNETH M. WILL
Associate Professor Emeritus Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin
RESEARCH ENGINEERS & SCIENTISTS SATISH BASTOLA GIOVANNI CIRCELLA THOMAS DOUTHAT NAN GAO FRANKLIN GBOLOGAH ANGSHUMAN GUIN YONGTAO HU JIN YEON KIM MARTIN KISTENMACHER JEFFREY NEWMAN MEHMET T. ODMAN MICHAEL O. RODGERS WONHO SUH JAVIER VILA MORAN CHING-CHIEH WEI YI-CHING WU CHUANG-SHENG WALTER YANG GUANGXUAN ZHU
People are our priority. The world is our laboratory.
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“There’s something special about learning the structural loading of a famous building or cathedral and then being able to leave the classroom two hours later and walk up to that very same structure.”
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UNDERGRADUATE DIANA CHUMAK GETS A RIDE FROM CLASSMATE BRITTNEY VIDAL DURING THEIR MONTH STUDYING STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING IN LONDON. RIGHT: VIDAL AT STONEHENGE. THE ANCIENT RUINS CONVINCED VIDAL SHE WANTS TO DEDICATE HER CAREER TO STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING.
Jackets abroad
Immersing themselves in a new culture. International research opportunities. Internships and work experience. Whatever it is that our students are looking for when they study abroad, the Joe S. Mundy Global Learning Endowment can help them find it. This dedicated $4 million fund helps students experience a different culture so they come back with a new global perspective on engineering, the arts, geo-politics and so much more.
Brittney Vidal London, England
I can’t remember the exact moment I decided I wanted to be a civil engineer. I can, however, remember the exact moment I realized that I wanted to pursue structural engineering as my preferred concentration of study within civil engineering. I was laying in the softest, most green grass, the wind was blowing perfectly — not too soft nor too violent — and I was gazing upon the most stunning site I’ve ever seen: Stonehenge.
Stonehenge took me by surprise. Looking at the structure was mesmerizing. To think that this simple, yet extremely complicated structure was built by humans thousands of years ago and it’s still standing seemingly untouched is mind-blowing. It was in that moment that I knew I wanted to focus on structural engineering. I wanted to build upon the engineering feat that I saw at Stonehenge. My month-long stay in London was my first time traveling to Europe, and it was extremely rewarding. From seeing Big Ben to riding the London Eye and visiting Buckingham Palace, I got to experience many sites that I had only previously seen in movies or TV shows. There’s something special about learning the structural loading of a famous building or cathedral and then being able to leave the classroom two hours later and walk up to that very same structure. London gave me the opportunity to directly relate my classwork to life examples in real time. Living in a city so rich in structural history was like nothing I had ever experienced before. It was truly shocking to look around the city and see not one, but multiple historical buildings that stood the test of time in their design and engineering.
PHOTOS COURTESY: BRITTNEY VIDAL
In addition to living in London for a month, I had the opportunity to travel to different countries on the weekends and explore new cities. My first weekend trip was to Edinburgh, Scotland, a city that took my breath away. The moment I stepped off the plane, I fell in love. My second weekend in Europe, I traveled to Paris, France. Paris was a very intriguing city. The Eiffel Tower was my favorite site that I visited. After three intense weeks of Intro to Structures homework, it was rewarding to apply my knowledge of trusses to what I saw within the Eiffel Tower. My second favorite place was the Louvre. I could have spent weeks gazing upon the beautiful ceiling pieces and larger-than-life paintings that covered entire walls. It was amazing. CEE London was an experience I will never forget. From the memories of studying late in the hostel, to traveling to different countries with friends, it was the most rewarding month of my life.
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Nejla Dzanic GT-Lorraine
I recently read an article about “10 Simple and Beautiful Rituals People Across the Globe Do In Order To Be Happy” and was surprised to see how many of these rituals I witnessed during my study abroad at Georgia TechLorraine in Metz, France, during summer 2017. I fully expected the summer to be very busy with classes, studying, traveling, sightseeing and more. However, I did not expect to see the different approaches to worklife balance that Europeans have. Five rituals from the article stood out to me: apéritif in France, siesta in Spain, gemütlichkeit in Germany, friluftsliv in Norway, and kafa in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
NEJLA DZANIC IN PARIS AT THE EIFFEL TOWER, ONE OF THE MANY PLACES IN EUROPE SHE VISITED DURING HER SEMESTER STUDYING AT GEORGIA TECHLORRAINE.
“I thought this summer would cement my career goals, such as the area of civil engineering in which I want to specialize and the area of the world where I would like to work. Instead of narrowing it down, this summer has only opened more opportunities and possibilities.”
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The apéritif is a “small drink before dinner to ease the transition from work to relaxation,” a ritual I found common not only in France, but in Croatia, too. A siesta is an after-lunch nap to rejuvenate oneself, and I could see this when the shops and restaurants were closed for a time during the afternoons in Barcelona, Spain. The goal of gemütlichkeit is to “create a space where you feel welcome and fulfilled,” which I saw when I visited my cousin in Germany. These rituals make the transition from work to relaxation more seamless. Friluftsliv means “spending time with nature to become one with the world.” While I did not visit Norway, I fully came to appreciate this saying while picking up an unexpected hobby: hiking in Switzerland. My roommate and I hiked the Hardergrat mountain ridge in Interlaken and Mount
Pilatus in Lucerne. The hikes were difficult, especially for someone who had never done much longdistance hiking, but the views were worth it. The Swiss Alps are a breathtaking place, and I fell in love with the country, especially the idea that I could work in the big cities there and spend the weekends hiking the mountains and getting lost in the natural beauty. I want this ritual of friluftsliv to become more ingrained in my life in the United States, so that I can more fully enjoy the little moments in nature. The final ritual, kafa in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a “ritualistic coffee with friends.” I am from that country and have participated in it many times. I used to think of it simply as a way to pass the time, and, given my restless nature, could never fully enjoy it. After my summer abroad, I have begun to see the balance that can be created with a fast-paced career and time taken to enjoy the simpler things in life. I thought this summer would cement my career goals, such as the area of civil engineering in which I want to specialize and the area of the world where I would like to work. Instead of narrowing it down, this summer has only opened more opportunities and possibilities. I am very thankful for the Joe S. Mundy Global Learning Endowment for the opportunity to experience an unforgettable study abroad and travel experience.
PHOTOS COURTESY: NEJLA DZANIC
TOP LEFT: DZANIC ATOP MOUNT SRD OVERLOOKING DUBROVNIK, CROATIA. TOP RIGHT: KAYAKERS PADDLE IN THE ADRIATIC SEA IN DUBROVNIK. BOTTOM: CINQUE TERRE ON THE ITALIAN RIVIERA COASTLINE.
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“I was overwhelmed by the beauty and power of the wilderness — glacier lakes of the clearest turquoise blue, the serenity of deep forests, harsh mountain passes giving way to lush valleys, hushed marshlands hidden in the depths of the mountains.”
New for 2017-2018
Elizabeth B. and William E. Higginbotham Beyond the Classroom Experience Fund This new opportunity supports a handful of students each year who want to expand their education with real-world experiences at home or abroad. That can be a work experience, like an internship or summer job, a research project, or some other professional learning opportunity.
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James B. Feldman Study Abroad Endowment James Feldman and his wife, Amy, created this endowment to help one student per year add something extra to their already planned study abroad trip. The Feldmans specifically wanted to give students a chance to extend their academic experience with extra travel, extended time abroad, or some other enhancement they otherwise would not have been able to afford.
Luke Reeve Canada
Luke Reeve originally intended to study rural pedestrian bridges in Haiti in summer 2017. However, his connections to sponsoring organizations fell through, and he decided instead to hike the Sawback Trail in Canada’s Banff National Park — solo — for five days. Banff and Jasper National Parks, located in the Canadian Rockies, are known as some of the most beautiful places in the world to hike.
LUKE REEVE AT JASPER NATIONAL PARK IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES. HE SPENT FIVE DAYS HIKING ALONE THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS.
PHOTOS COURTESY: LUKE REEVE
I was overwhelmed by the beauty and power of the wilderness — glacier lakes of the clearest turquoise blue, the serenity of deep forests, harsh mountain passes giving way to lush valleys, hushed marshlands hidden in the depths of the mountains. These landscapes and more I hiked through, in solitude, for five days. My mind meditated on what my eyes were seeing: nature, in its rawest form, exerts a dominating presence, one that soaked me through and began to leave its impression on my own psychological landscape. This impression was a respect for the wonderfully terrible power of life itself: its merciless unpredictability on one extreme, and its never-ending graciousness on the other. These characteristics reduced my frame of mind from the high-level abstractions associated with living in a highly developed and intellectual society, back to the purest consideration of life: survival. Survival is the ultimate plight of humanity. Although modern developed society has seemingly caused a paradigm shift from living for survival to living for comfort, I was reminded of the distilled purity of life — that is, survival. I was concerned with my own survival, carrying everything I needed to live on my back. This way of living brought with it a level of awareness that I had not experienced ever before, one that reminded me of some of the pure elements that I feel make life worth living: the ability to earn one’s own living, the consciousness to marvel at beauty, the sublime peace that accompanies silence, the supernatural connection between two people, the ability to love. I was reminded of these things, and these things in turn reminded me that it is a joy to be alive. Through this experience, I have begun to see the world — even more so, life itself — as one grand opportunity. The opportunity is this: to learn as much as I want; to see as much as I want; to experience as much as I want; to glean from the wisdom of the world; and to be thoroughly, thoroughly human. This is my life’s endeavor.
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Field notes
#GTBolivia
Urban water quality
Global Engineering Leadership Minor
Engineering students across Georgia Tech can supplement their technical studies with a series of courses that incorporate elements of leadership and global perspectives in the context of engineering. Developed by and housed within the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, this minor develops graduates with problemsolving, leadership and interpersonal skills, as well as conceptual skills and cross-cultural competence.
#DaretoDelft
Sustainable transportation
#CEELondon
Structural engineering and history
HOW IT WORKS: • Students take two foundational courses that present the foundations of leadership theory and apply those ideas in engineering contexts. • They engage with engineering grand challenges through several elective courses, some of which include international travel. • They complete an international research or work practicum to apply their knowledge. For the first time this year, three of those courses traveled concurrently to different continents over spring break, positioning dozens of students in Europe, Asia and South America. In May, a fourth class set up shop for a month in London to study structural engineering, culture and history. Share their journeys through the pictures and words they sent back from abroad. CE.GATECH.EDU/LEADERSHIP 37
#GTChina
Disaster recovery and resilience
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Origami Engineering New grand challenges course in 2017 blends students from colleges of sciences, engineering, design in first-of-its-kind experiment.
AS THE FINAL PROJECT IN ORIGAMI ENGINEERING, STUDENT TEAMS USED ORIGAMI TO DESIGN A PRODUCT WITH SOCIAL BENEFITS. THESE “ORILIGHTS” USE SOLAR PANELS FOR POWER. OTHER TEAMS, AT RIGHT, CREATED A NEW HYGENIC CAST FOR BROKEN BONES, A SELFCLEANING SOLAR ARRAY, AND A STRUCTURALLY STABLE SHELTER. READ MORE ABOUT THEIR IDEAS AT CE.GATECH.EDU/ ANNUALREPORT
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After nearly a decade of quietly turning the idea over in his mind, Glaucio Paulino took the leap last fall. Origami engineering had engaged his mind and driven some of his research over that time, so he decided to finally teach an undergraduate class on the subject — the first of its kind anywhere in the country. But rather than limit enrollment to civil and environmental engineering students, he threw open the doors to any student at Georgia Tech. It was a risk. “This class was different from every other class I have taken or taught in my life,” he said with a chuckle, because usually “the students are quite homogeneous, quite similar, and that makes it easier to teach. “This class was highly heterogeneous, and I had to learn how to teach. That was the challenge. Even during the semester, I didn’t know if it would be a failure or a success.”
“My approach was to teach the same subject in different ways,” said Paulino, the Raymond Allen Jones Chair in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. For any one lesson, that might have included working through the underlying geometry at the white board; using illustrations; or creating Lego-type models, prototypes and hands-on experiments. “I loved how this class was filled with so many different majors,” said Nabilah Khanam, a biomedical engineering student who used the course toward her minor in global engineering leadership. “It helped bring in new perspectives to class discussions. It exposed me to what different skills and knowledge others majors on campus have, but also helped me see that, in some ways, we are all similar.” The class finished with projects where groups had to include students from at least two different majors, one of the ways Paulino said he could capitalize on students’ varying experiences. They created designs using origami for social good and displayed their work in a trade show in the hightraffic Mason Building lobby. Some students even traveled to Japan with Paulino after the class ended to work with students at the University of Tokyo and meet some of the pioneers of origami. Industrial and systems engineering student Margo Bridgers said she had been interested in origami since she was a child, so “when I saw there was a class that explained and expanded on the subject of origami [and] incorporated origami in engineering, I had to be a part of it.” But she found some of the math challenging and was frustrated that she didn’t understand some of it as well as her peers. “It was such an amazing experience to have group members from other majors who were willing to help me as well as inspire me and give me the encouragement I needed when I was feeling discouraged,” Bridgers said. “I grew so much from this class.” Paulino is already planning version 2.0 of Origami Engineering for fall 2018. He said he’s glad he finally found the space to teach the course in the first place. “I really appreciate the wonderful environment we have here at Georgia Tech and how open people are to new ideas. This is what makes this a fantastic place,” Paulino said. “I have been thinking about it for many years, but only after I came here could I make it happen.”
Global Engineering Leadership Minor
COURSES
Environmental Technology in the Developing World
Smart and Sustainable Cities
Construction Management & Megaprojects
Introduction to Structural Engineering
International Disaster Reconnaissance Studies
Historic Structures
Sustainable Transportation Abroad
Origami Engineering
TOP RIGHT TWO PHOTOS COURTESY LARISSA NOVELINO. LEFT PHOTO AND RIGHT LOWER PHOTOS: JESS HUNT-RALSTON.
The hope was that students from all kinds of backgrounds could see how the principles of origami might apply in science, engineering and technology. Ultimately, Paulino ended up with a group of roughly 50 students from every engineering discipline plus architecture, physics, math and more. “Heterogenous” might be a bit of an understatement.
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What’s
new? STUDENTS A simple, low-cost E. coli test developed by undergraduate ARJUN BIR wowed judges at the 2018 MIT Water Innovation competition, earning the $15,000 grand prize. The Georgia Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers honored two master’s students in 2017: part-time grad student ANNIE BLISSIT won the Young Civil Engineer of the Year award and MAYA GOLDMAN received a President’s Award. RODRIGO BORELA received one of 10
fellowships from the Geosynthetics Institute for his work optimizing consumption of construction materials on infrastructure projects.
PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
The Federal Highway Administration named six graduate students Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellows, including five first-time recipients: DAVID BOYER, CALVIN CLARK, CHELSEA DYESS, DAVID EDERER, LAUREN GARDNER and DANIEL WALLS.
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ABBY FRANCISCO
GARDNER also won a Wayne
Shackelford Scholarship from the Intelligent Transportation Society of Georgia, along with ANIRBAN CHATTERJEE, HAOBING LIU, CIBI PRANAV and ZOE TURNERYOVANOVITCH. And CHATTERJEE attended the Road Scholar Program in Washington as an International Road Federation Fellow for 2018. Meanwhile, CLARK received a scholarship from the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists program, along with OSVALDO BROESICKE, ANNA SKIPPER and XENIA WIRTH. SKIPPER also spent the fall semester
doing research in the G.K. Batchelor Laboratory at the University of Cambridge as a David Crighton Fellow for 2017, one of only four students selected worldwide. The Eno Center for Transportation invited DAVID EDERER to Washington for an inside look at transportation policymaking at the Future Leaders Development Conference as a 2018 Eno fellow. Ederer also won the Dr. Thomas D. Larson Fellowship to pay for his attendance at the conference. The National Science Foundation awarded a graduate fellowship to ABBY FRANCISCO for her work helping people understand their energy use and, as a result, act more sustainably.
The Atlanta chapter of WTS awarded scholarships to three transportation students in October: ALICE GROSSMAN won the Leadership Legacy Scholarship for Graduates, ANN LI won the Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship, and TU NGUYEN won the Molitoris Leadership Scholarship for Undergraduates. The Georgia chapter of the American Concrete Institute awarded BILL JIN the Robert H. Kuhlman Student Scholarship to support his research on concrete sustainability. LIN HTET KYAW won one of 11 national
scholarships from civil engineering honor society Chi Epsilon, a first for a Georgia Tech student. The American Society of Civil Engineers selected AJAY SAINI for its 2018 O.H. Ammann Research Fellowship in Structural Engineering, supporting his work in structural reliability and resilience.
THE ASCE CONCRETE CANOE TEAM LAUNCHES THEIR VESSEL FOR THE WOMEN’S SPRINT RACE, WHERE CHAPTER PRESIDENT CAROLINE STANTON AND CONFERENCE CHAIR ALESA STALLMAN PLACED SECOND AFTER WINNING THEIR HEAT. RIGHT: THE ASCE CHAPTER’S STEEL BRIDGE BUILD TEAM, LEFT TO RIGHT: ZONGLIN “JACK” LI, JOSH BUTH, JASON TAM AND PETER PSALTAKIS.
No. 2 Undergraduate civil engineering program
No. 2 Undergraduate environmental engineering program
No. 2 Graduate civil engineering program
No. 5 Graduate environmental engineering program
Undergraduate students: 677 Graduate students: 472 Women: 43% Minority: 19% International: 32% Students-to-faculty: 21:1 Student organizations: 11 Study abroad trips funded this year: 67 FROM LEFT, ZONGLIN “JACK” LI, SAMUEL DENNARD, CAROLINE STANTON, LIN HTET KYAW AND MIHAI MAVRODIN.
SCOTTY SMITH will spend six months
living abroad and doing research at École des Ponts (ParisTech) on concrete durability and sustainability as a 2018-2019 STEM Chateaubriand Fellow, a French analog to the wellknown Fulbright Fellowships.
SOURCES: CE.GATECH.EDU/SOURCES
A U.S. Department of Transportation research center picked ALANA WILSON as its unanimous Student of the Year in 2017, sending her to the represent the Center for Advancing Research in Transportation Emissions, Energy and Health at the annual Transportation Research Board meeting.
The GEORGIA TECH CHAPTER of the American Society of Civil Engineers won first place overall at the Carolinas Regional Conference. The team also won the hydraulics, transportation and environmental competitions.
LEFT PHOTO: VY LE. RIGHT: ANNIE YU MENG.
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What’s
new? Welcoming Assistant Professor Samuel D. Coogan
PHOTO COURTESY: SAM COOGAN
FACULTY Freshman to faculty A new faculty member with one foot in electrical engineering and another in civil engineering is working to make sure the transportation systems of the future can accommodate all the different demands they will face, from self-driving cars to technologies we haven’t even imagined yet. SAMUEL COOGAN joined the Georgia Tech faculty in the fall as an assistant professor in both the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. It’s a unique position he said speaks to the realities of our rapidly changing world. “The research frontier for smart and autonomous systems is increasingly at the boundary of traditional disciplines, and my joint appointment is especially critical for developing a research program that crosses these boundaries,” Coogan said. “For example, one direction of my research uses control theory to study traffic flow, and my joint appointment makes it seamless to collaborate with both CEE and ECE faculty with diverse expertise in areas related to this research. In addition, by being a faculty member in ECE and CEE, I am able to work with excellent graduate and undergraduate students from different backgrounds and interests.
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The Construction Industry Institute honored BAABAK ASHURI as the 2018 Outstanding Early Career Researcher. RUDY BONAPARTE delivered the nation’s premier geotechnical
engineering presentation, the Karl Terzaghi Lecture, at the 2018 American Society of Civil Engineers Geo-Institute annual meeting. BARRY GOODNO published a new hybrid
textbook, Statics and Mechanics of Materials, in October. FRANCISCO FEDELE was invited to present
rogue wave research at the G7 maritime security meeting in Rome.
“I’ve already experienced first-hand the collaborative and energetic atmosphere on campus. I’m certainly excited to be back,” he said. That energy made him want to return, Coogan said. “It was clear that there’s an eagerness to push the boundaries and tackle ‘big’ problems. In particular, it is apparent that Georgia Tech intends to be at the research frontier in developing the next generation of smart, autonomous and connected transportation systems, and I certainly wanted to be a part of this exciting opportunity.” Coogan said his research focuses on autonomy for cyber-physical systems, especially transportation networks, which will have to accommodate more users, new technologies and mountains of new data while keeping people safe and enabling them to get where they want to go. “Controlling and managing societal-scale infrastructure systems like this poses unique challenges that will require solutions from diverse disciplines,” he said. “In my research, I’m especially
“Fortunately, Georgia Tech recognizes the significant potential in overcoming outdated barriers, and I’m grateful to be able to call both schools home.”
interested in applying tools from control theory and dynamical systems to develop the theoretical foundations and algorithms for ensuring that such systems operate efficiently, with formal guarantees of performance.”
Coogan came to Tech from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was an assistant professor in the electrical engineering department for two years. But he started his academic career as an electrical engineering undergrad at Tech.
Before his time at UCLA, Coogan was a postdoctoral researcher at Sensys Networks, a company that develops wireless solutions for traffic detection. He also has worked as a research intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
LAWRENCE KAHN was the Precast/Prestressed
ADJO AMEKUDZI-KENNEDY and SPYROS PAVLOSTATHIS became fellows of the
Concrete Institute’s Educator of the Year for 2017. PAUL MAYNE will take his expertise on the
road as the ASCE Geo-Institute’s Cross-USA Lecturer for 2018-2019. The Transportation Research Board invited PATRICIA MOKHTARIAN to deliver the signature presentation at its annual meeting, the 2018 Thomas B. Deen Distinguished Lecture. GLAUCIO PAULINO and JERRY QI won the Best Faculty
Paper award from Sigma Xi for their 4D printing research published in Scientific Reports.
American Society of Civil Engineers. PAVLOSTATHIS also received the Fair Distinguished Engineering Educator Medal from the Water Environment Federation, the organization’s most prestigious award for educators. Assistant Professor IRIS TIEN and Ph.D. student CHLOE JOHANSEN garnered the top paper award at Resilience Week 2017 for their study on the vulnerabilities of interdependent infrastructure using Atlanta’s water and power systems as a case study.
The Georgia Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers honored DAVID SCOTT with a President’s Award for 2017 for his longstanding service to the industry and students.
The American Institute of Steel Construction honored DONALD WHITE with a lifetime achievement award for his work advancing the use of structural steel.
ABOVE PHOTOS: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
ABOVE LEFT PHOTO: ZONGLIN “JACK” LI. ABOVE RIGHT COURTESY: IRIS TIEN.
Ph.D. to professor ERIC MARKS joined the School in the fall as a professor of the practice — a homecoming of sorts, since Marks earned his Ph.D. in the School a few years ago. He said he looks forward to bringing the construction site into the classroom for his students. “I work closely with global construction companies to identify newly developed technology and innovation that are improving the industry,” he said. “This collaboration enables my students to understand advances in technology and project workflow.” Marks came to Georgia Tech from the University of Alabama, where he also taught civil and construction engineering. He’s a licensed professional engineer and managed capital-intensive transportation infrastructure construction projects for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet before he turned his focus to teaching. “It is an exciting time to be involved with the construction industry. Each construction project presents unique challenges along with industry-wide issues, including sustainability, failing infrastructure and workforce shortages,” Marks said. “These challenges present great opportunities for collaboration between decision-makers in the industry and academics.” Marks said he found studying at Georgia Tech presented him with many opportunities, so he’s looking forward to capitalizing on that network in his teaching. “I’m eager to collaborate with the well-known research and teaching faculty of our School,” he said. “I’m also excited to facilitate connections between our students and leading companies in the construction industry.”
Welcoming Professor of the Practice Eric Marks 44
What’s
new?
LEO VECELLIO JR. joined the Georgia
PHOTO: GARY W. MEEK
Tech Engineering Hall of Fame at the College of Engineering Alumni Awards.
Television network BET honored civil engineering alumna SUZANNE SHANK with one of its 2017 Black Girls Rock! Awards. Shank won the Shot Caller award for her trailblazing career on Wall Street, where she is chair, CEO and co-founder of municipal bond firm Siebert Cisneros Shank & Co. “I am humbled to share the stage with these talented and dynamic black women,” Shank said at the awards ceremony. “I came from modest beginnings but had encouragement from my parents and mentors that allowed me to achieve a level of success I never imagined. I hope my path serves as an example and provides encouragement to girls and young women to dream big and to pursue their dreams fully.” Shank shared the stage with the year’s other winners, including U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, singer Roberta Flack, and community organizers Derrica and Natalie Wilson.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame added Georgia Tech civil engineer JACQUELINE QUINN to its list of “the greatest innovators” in our country.
PHOTO COURTESY: SANIVATION
The College also selected I.J. “IKE” SCOTT III for the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni and ZAKIYA AYO-ZAHRA SEYMOUR for the Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni.
PHOTO COURTESY: BET.COM
PHOTO: GARY W. MEEK
ALUMNI
The inaugural Dean’s Impact Award went to Sanivation, co-founded by 2011 alumnus ANDREW FOOTE.
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Quinn, who earned a bachelor’s in civil engineering in 1989, is part of the 2018 class of inductees announced in Popular Science. She was honored for her role in developing a cleaning technology to remove chlorinated solvents from the groundwater around Kennedy Space Center in Florida left over from the early days of the space program. PHOTO COURTESY: JACQUELINE QUINN
PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
Engineering Georgia included 19 civil and environmental engineering graduates from Georgia Tech on its first-ever list of women shaping the state’s engineering community. Among them is KARI WATKINS, who earned her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1997 and now is the School’s Frederick Law Olmsted Associate Professor. The magazine cited her work on real-time transit information with her OneBusAway app and her research into multi-modal transportation. “Women’s contributions to the field have long been overlooked, but many of the women on this list are the movers and the shakers in our field,” Watkins said. “Women are often the ones in public service, so they may make less money, but in many ways, they are the ones making the critical decisions about the direction of fields like transportation and water.” Other engineers on the list of 100 Influential Women to Know have done extensive work in industry organizations, volunteered in their communities, and led significant projects around the state. They include: ANITA ATKINSON, P.E.
Arcadis picked three young alumnae for its 2017 Global Shapers program: YASHIKA AGARWALLA, KELSEY EICHBAUER and ANA JAYARO.
Georgia Transportation Ops Manager, Division Vice President Jacobs
ANNIE BLISSIT, P.E.
EMILY MEADOR, P.E.
Water Treatment Engineer Gresham, Smith & Partners
Senior Vice President, Kimley-Horn EMMY MONTANYE, P.E., LEED AP
VICTORIA “TORI” BRINKLEY, P.E.
Principal, Kimley-Horn
Senior Transportation Engineer T.Y. Lin International
CATHERINE OWENS, P.E., LEED AP
ANNIE GILLESPIE, P.E.
The Florida Bicycle Association named AMY INGLES statewide bicycle professional of the year for her work making Jacksonville more bike-friendly.
Trade publication Civil + Structural Engineer named JENNIFER WEGER one of its rising stars for 2018. She was one of only 13 civil engineers to make this year’s list. ABOVE PHOTOS COURTESY: YASHIKA AGARWALLA, KELSEY EICHBAUER, ANA JAYARO, AMY INGLES, HNTB.
DAVEITTA JENKINS KNIGHT, P.E.
Vice President Civil Engineering and Surveying Patterson & Dewar Engineers, Inc.
Director of Engineering State Road and Tollway Authority
Principal Engineer Atlanta BeltLine, Inc. MARGARET “MEG” PIRKLE, P.E.
Project Manager, AECOM
Chief Engineer Georgia Department of Transportation
LAURY JILL HODGES, P.E., CPESC
NICOLE REUTLINGER, P.E.
KATHERINE MCLEOD GURD, P.E.
Chief Design Engineer, VHB
Project Director, Atkins
JENNY JENKINS, P.E.
BETH ANN SCHWARTZ, P.E.
Senior Transportation Engineer, VHB KAREN JENKINS, P.E., AIA
Co-Founder and Managing Partner Shear Structural BETTY JEAN JORDAN, P.E.
Instructor, NPDES Training Institute; Executive Director, Georgia Society of Professional Engineers
Senior Associate Michael Baker International MELISSA WHEELER
Transmission Project Management Georgia Power Company LISA WOODS, P.E., F.SEI, F.ASCE
Project Manager, HNTB 46
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Alma matters PHOTO: ROB FELT
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Stay gold MASTER’S STUDENT VARUN ELAPROLU, LEFT, WITH HIS MENTOR, JIMMY MITCHELL. THEY WERE ONE OF THE FIRST PAIRINGS THROUGH THE SCHOOL’S NEW GOLD MENTORING INITIATIVE. THE PROGRAM PAIRS INTERESTED STUDENTS WITH ALUMNI OR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS WHO WANT TO HELP THEM PREPARE FOR THEIR CAREERS. “IT’S REFRESHING TO TAKE A STEP BACK AND THINK ABOUT SOMEBODY ELSE,” SAYS MITCHELL. “QUITE OFTEN, YOU CAN HELP THOSE PEOPLE, AND YOU CAN ALSO LEARN A LITTLE ABOUT YOURSELF AS WELL.”
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GOLD
MENTORING PROGRAM
C O N N E CT S S T U D E NT S W IT H PROFESSIONALS AND ALUMNI The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering rolled out a new mentoring program in the fall to connect students with alumni and engineering professionals who want to help them prepare for their post-college lives. Created at the urging of the School’s alumni, the GOLD Mentoring Program — Growing Opportunities for Learning and Discovery — hand-selects mentors for interested students, including students who are traveling or studying abroad. The mentoring relationships can last for a semester or for years, depending on the interests of the student and their professional mentor. “It’s about perspective. I learn a lot from mentor-protégé relationships,” said Jimmy Mitchell, sustainability manager at Skanska USA and a 2005 civil engineering graduate. “Honestly, we work hard; we have our heads down nonstop for our clients and our tasks, and for me, it’s refreshing to take a step back and think about somebody else. Quite often, you can help those people, and you can also learn a little bit about yourself as well.” Mitchell was one of the first professionals who signed up for the mentoring program. He’s been meeting with Varun Elaprolu, a master’s student who had worked for a few years as an engineer in India before starting graduate school. Elaprolu had spent time helping students in India decide which engineering discipline to study, so he already knew the value of that kind of relationship. “I felt that I was also gaining knowledge by mentoring them. After coming to the U.S., it’s a whole new country, a whole new city, and the way things work is completely different than how things were back in India. I thought maybe I should have someone I could ask questions about my career and who’s experienced in this field.”
PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
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Mitchell has made a point of inviting Elaprolu to events where he can expand his professional network and involved him in some of Mitchell’s volunteer efforts. “Varun’s background is not the United States, but it was fun to talk on the same page and learn about each other,” Mitchell said. “I like that a lot.” “The mentorship program is not only about asking for a job or something like that from the mentor; it’s about building a relationship,” Elaprolu said, “one you will cherish even after you leave the School.” The GOLD program also links students traveling abroad with professionals in their destination country. That way, the students can expand their international experiences, according to Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy, the School’s associate chair for global engineering leadership and research development. “Last year, more than 80 students interned, studied or conducted research abroad through our global engineering leadership minor, the Mundy fund, and study abroad programs,” she said. “The GOLD program offers a great opportunity to connect our students with our alumni at home and abroad, helping to create richer experiences for them.”
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GET INVOLVED!
GOLD
MENTORING PROGRAM Growing Opportunities for Learning and Discovery — we call it GOLD for short — is our new mentoring program connecting students with industry partners and alumni. This relationship can be as robust or casual as you would like. Students and mentors can connect face-to-face, by phone or online, allowing alumni and companies from anywhere in the world to participate. There are no rules or requirements once you’re matched with a mentor or student — just that you find a way to make it a mutually rewarding experience.
CE.GATECH.EDU/MENTORING
PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
CAP
CORPORATE AFFILIATES PROGRAM
The Corporate Affiliates Program links the School’s students more closely with industry partners. Companies get direct access and quality interactions with the region’s brightest young civil and environmental engineers. Students, likewise, get facetime with recruiters and a window into the working world. They also receive: √√ VIP placement in CEE’s Annual Career Expo √√ Access to interview rooms in the Mason Building √√ VIP marketing support to CEE students √√ VIP posting of jobs and internships √√ A Day in the Mason Building Lobby √√ A session in one of the School’s seminar series √√ The opportunity to pair company employees with CEE students for mentoring and career guidance √√ Invitations to networking events with CEE alumni, faculty members and students
2017 CEE ANNUAL CAREER EXPO LEFT PHOTO: FITRAH HAMID ABOVE: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
2 0 1 7 - 2 0 1 8 PA RT N E R S
LEARN MORE: CE.GATECH.EDU/CAP 52
Confidence and fortitude Leadership is complicated — “squishy,” even — but the principles are simple, according to the fall 2017 Hyatt Distinguished Alumni Leadership Speaker. The hard part is applying those principles effectively. From hard-won experience leading megaprojects worth billions for Bechtel Corp. in remote corners of the globe, ANDY PHELPS shared advice and perspective with a room full of Georgia Tech students, faculty and alumni in October. “[Leadership is] a complicated, squishy topic. It’s not like engineering, where you’ve got an equation to solve it,” said Phelps, who retired in 2017 as principal vice president and global manager for operations of Bechtel’s mining and metals business. “It’s that soft side that’s so important in what we do.” Phelps said leaders need to be open, honest and ethical in their dealings with employees and with customers. He said they need to build teams with a diversity of backgrounds, cultures and perspectives. And they need to take care of their people. “All of us have times that we have needs or our families have needs, and we need to be respectful of that,” he said. “We need to help people go take those breaks.” Phelps said he once had a project manager who needed a kidney transplant but was so committed to his work that he wasn’t going to take time off to get the new organ. “I said, ‘You’re killing yourself. I’ll give you a choice: I will either fire you or I’ll give you a three month leave of absence to go take a break.’” That point surfaced again when Phelps noted another key leadership trait: anticipating problems. “Leaders need to be people that are looking for signs, they’re looking for signals that there are issues. They’re looking for those problems, anticipating them,” said Phelps, who earned his bachelor’s in civil engineering from Georgia Tech in 1976. “They’re looking [out] for the health of their teams, their employees, caring about those things, and anticipating them.”
Part of heading off those problems, he said, is knowing when to ask for help. “It’s cheating the team if you have a problem and you don’t raise it.” Leaders also must empower the people they lead, he said. “There’s a difference between delegating and empowering. Huge difference. Empowering means you trust the person to make a decision,” Phelps said. “You’ve got to trust your team. That’s probably one of the most important things that you can do.” Phelps said the projects he worked on often impacted the home country’s economic output directly — sometimes accounting for more than 10 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP. They were often what he called “bet the company” projects because of their size and impact. For Phelps, that meant he had to find project managers who could endure enormous pressures. “[I was] looking for leaders that have the confidence and the fortitude to stand toe-to-toe with governments and with customers and stand for what’s right — and have the background to be able to hold the line on cost and schedule,” Phelps said. Phelps oversaw the design and construction of five copper concentrators, three aluminum smelters, one alumina refinery, one bauxite mine, one potash mine, and the world’s second-largest desalination plant at Bechtel. He also helped lead the restructuring of the British nuclear industry and the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos national labs in the United States. In 2015, he received the American Society of Civil Engineers’ highest honor: an Outstanding Projects and Leaders Lifetime Achievement Award. “I’ve just had an incredible career. I just feel very lucky at all the things I’ve gotten to do,” Phelps said. “I sometimes would be on a trip at a job and sort of pinch myself, saying, ‘Somebody’s paying me to do this? I would do this for free.’”
“Leaders need to be people that are looking for signs, they’re looking for signals that there are issues.” ANDY PHELPS
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FALL 2017 HYAT T LECTURE
Andy Phelps KENNETH HYATT DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI LEADERSHIP SPEAKER WATCH CE.GATECH.EDU/HYATT PHOTO COURTESY: ANDY PHELPS
ANDY PHELPS, BCE 1976, CLIMBING MONT BLANC IN THE ALPS, ONE OF MANY OF HIS LIFE’S ADVENTURES.
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“Run right at your problem. It’s not going to get better over time.” BILL CALHOUN
Bill Calhoun KENNETH HYATT DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI LEADERSHIP SPEAKER WATCH CE.GATECH.EDU/HYATT 55
Compound interest Do the right thing. Be introspective when things don’t go the way you want. Run right at your problems. Remember the people. Give back. Those were some of the highlights of the presentation from BILL CALHOUN in February as part of the Hyatt Distinguished Alumni Leadership Speaker Series, drawn from Calhoun’s three decades of experience and now as a leader of Clark Construction Group. Calhoun, a 1981 civil engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, said he spent time on cross-country flights pouring out his personal priorities in two sessions of stream-of-consciousness writing. That raw material became five guiding principles for leadership and formed the basis of his spring 2018 Hyatt lecture. “Think about who you want to be and what guides you,” said Calhoun, vice chairman and executive vice president of Clark Construction. “I suggest that doing the right thing is what should guide you. Remember, it’s always about the people and the process, not just the results. Think about empathy and get to win-win. Have fun. Make some friends along the way. And love what you do every day.” Some of those lessons came through difficult projects and hard-won experience. Calhoun recalled a “flagship” project where he managed all of the interior construction. He recalled many tough conversations over changes, falling behind on the schedule, and people not doing what they were supposed to. “I was the battle master. I won every argument — professionally, not ugly,” he said. But there was a cost: When the developer started to negotiate with Clark Construction for the next project, it was with the proviso that Calhoun wasn’t involved. He realized later a better way to do business was not to win every battle, but to focus on what’s best for the project.
On another big project — this time for the federal government — regulators put him on notice that they would be watching every detail of the company’s labor practices and were “going to make a target out of you.” Calhoun said he spent a few days looking at labor regulations and understanding requirements. Then he called the regulator back and asked to work together to make the project an example of everything federal contractors could do right. The company ended up winning an award for that effort. “Run right at your problem,” Calhoun said. “It’s not going to get better over time.” Calhoun said he’s also learned how important it is for leaders to understand the business of their business — and their clients’ business, too. “We’re in business to make profit,” he said. “That’s not an ugly word. Profit enables us to reinvest in the company, in our people, develop our people, give back to the community.” For Calhoun, giving back has included service to professional organizations, getting involved at Georgia Tech, and volunteering with a Washington D.C. organization called So Others Might Eat. He said it started early in his career when a manager encouraged him to get involved with the Association of General Contractors. “At the time, I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t have the time to do it — I had a young family, I was working six days a week — but I did it. And it pays dividends all the time.” “It’s like putting money in the bank, in terms of compound interest growth.”
“Part of doing the right thing, to me, is acting in the project’s best interest, not your own self-interest,” Calhoun said. “This was a growth for me.” He reasoned that if clients wanted to work with him again, that meant they wanted to work with his company: “Isn’t that the right perspective? My perspective has changed ever since.” “You have to be introspective when you didn’t get the outcome you want,” Calhoun said. “You have to be strong enough to accept your weaknesses, seek counsel, listen to people, and get smarter. That is part of being accountable.”
HYATT SPEAKER BILL CALHOUN WITH FACULTY MEMBERS ADJO AMEKUDZI-KENNEDY, LEFT, KIMBERLY KURTIS AND BAABAK ASHURI. LEFT PHOTO COURTESY: CLARK CONSTRUCTION. ABOVE: JESS HUNT-RALSTON.
SPRING 2018 HYATT LECTURE
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Spring 2019 Alumni Trip M e e t u s i n S a n Ju a n ce.gatech.edu/puerto-rico ABOVE: CUEVA VENTANA IN ARECIBO, PUERTO RICO
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PHOTO: FLICKR USER JORGEQ82 (JORGE QUINTEROS)
PUERTO RICO
2019 ALUMNI TRIP
External expertise The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering added expertise in bridge-building, transportation systems, investing, IT and real estate development to its External Advisory Board this fall. Five alumni joined the board in October: DONALD PAUL, RICHARD HUMMEL, ORLANDO MENDEZ, I.J. SCOTT III, AND MEG PIRKLE. Each will serve six-year terms as outside counselors to the School’s leadership on everything from curriculum and student preparedness to fundraising and alumni outreach. “Georgia Tech really helped prepare me for the opportunities and career that I had,” said Paul, who earned his bachelor’s in 1980 and spent his career in consulting and information technology with what’s now Accenture, as well as at Georgia Pacific and The Home Depot. “If there is anything that I can do to help pass those opportunities on to others through their Georgia Tech education, I wanted to do that.”
“Value investing … basically, it's all about looking for your downside and making sure that if you make an investment, you have a large margin of safety if you are wrong,” Hummel said. “That's what engineering is all about.” Mendez has made his career in construction and real estate since he left Tech. He’s now chief executive officer at the Dorado Beach Resort in Puerto Rico, a luxury resort community with private residences and a high-end hotel. He also helped manage the $100 million reconstruction and remodeling of the San Juan Marriott Resort and Stellaris Casino. Pirkle and Scott, meanwhile, blend their careers in transportation and structural engineering, respectively, occasionally even working together on projects. Pirkle is chief engineer of the Georgia Department of Transportation, and Scott’s eponymous Scott Bridge Company does substantial work for the department.
Paul started his career working on petrochemical projects for Brown & Root Construction Company and said he carried his engineering skills through every job.
“I just love building bridges,” said Scott, the latest member of his family to run the company. The firm builds bridges for DOTs across the South as well as railroad companies like CSX and Norfolk Southern. “I can remember my granddad carrying me around to bridge jobs in the summertime at the youngest age, and [I was] just fascinated by it,” Scott said.
“In [civil engineering], you solve problems. There is not one single way to solve a problem, there are many,” he said. “The way to best understand what problem you are trying to solve is to ask questions. Without asking questions, you can solve a problem, and it may be an OK solution. If you ask good questions, you can often [develop] a really good solution.”
Scott’s company spans four generations of his family. Now he’s looking at the next generation of family members who will assume the mantle of leadership, tackling the challenging projects Scott said have become the firm’s specialty. That also gives him a bit more time, he said, to give back to the alma mater: “I wouldn’t be where I am today without my education [at Tech].”
Engineering offered Hummel a similar framework for his career, which started with the Shell Oil Company, but branched out into investing after a few years. “I always think engineering,” said Hummel, a 1989 graduate who is the founder of Commodore Investments and co-founder of Federal Holdings Inc. He drew a parallel between the kind of value investing he might do and how engineers approach a project.
Pirkle earned a master’s degree in civil engineering in 1997 and is a licensed professional engineer, a combination she said has proven valuable in her work at GDOT. “I think it adds a level of real credibility when people hear you have a master's degree from Georgia Tech,” Pirkle said. “They immediately in their mind think, ‘Oh wow, she can do anything.’” “I'm so proud of Georgia Tech and to be a part of it, so I love the idea of giving something back [as a member of the advisory board],” she said.
PHOTOS COURTESY: DONALD PAUL, RICHARD HUMMEL, ORLANDO MENDEZ, I.J. SCOTT III, MEG PIRKLE.
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External Advisory Board Jim V. Anderson BCE 1988, MSCE 1989 Chief Executive Officer, SocialFlow José M. Bern BCE 1995 Vice President, Empresas Bern Rick L. Garcia BCE 1973 Retired, Delta Airlines Bill Higginbotham, P.E. ADVISORY BOARD CHAIR
BCE 1976 President and CEO ET Environmental Corporation
Michael F. Houlihan, P.E., F.ASCE BCE 1985, MSCE 1987 Principal Engineer and Vice President, Geosyntec Consultants John U. Huffman BCE 1981 Retired President and CEO Pepco Energy Services Richard H. Hummel II, CFA BCE 1989 Founder, Commodore Investments LLC and CoFounder, Federal Holdings Inc. John M. Kelley BCE 1992 Partner and Senior Vice President of Commercial Development North American Properties
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Orlando R. Mendez, P.E. BCE 1991, MSCE 1992 Chief Executive Officer Dorado Beach Resort
CEEATGT EXTERNAL ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS provide an important outside perspective that is essential to maintaining the relevance of our programs to industry. They play a significant role in vetting programs designed for students, alumni and corporate constituencies to ensure we maintain the highest quality standards in our curriculum, practice and outreach.
Edward Metzger BCE 1980 National Accounts Manager Trane Inc. James L. Mitchell BSCE 2005 Sustainability Manager Skanska USA Emmy Montanye, P.E., LEED AP ADVISORY BOARD VICE CHAIR
BCE 1982 Senior Vice President Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc.
Stephen P. Mulva, Ph.D. Ph.D. 2004 Director Construction Industry Institute University of Texas at Austin Charles W. Nelson, P.E. BCE 1970 Chairman, Waldemar S. Nelson and Company, Inc. Christopher D. Pappas BCE 1978 President and CEO, Trinseo Donald W. Paul BCE 1980 Retired, Georgia Pacific
Todd I. Long BCE 1989, MSCE 1990 Chief Operating Officer, Moreland Altobelli Associates, LLC
Meg Pirkle, P.E. MSCE 1997 Chief Engineer, Georgia Department of Transportation
Silvio J. López BCE 1979, MSCE 1981 Senior Vice President Banco Popular
Josh Rowan, P.E. BCE 1996 Branch Manager McDonough Bolyard Peck Inc.
Franklin Rucker, P.E. BCE 1979 Executive Program Manager Jacobs International Consultants Wassim A. Selman, Ph.D., P.E. BCE 1981, MSCE 1982, Ph.D. 1986 President, North American Infrastructure, Arcadis I. J. Scott III BCE 1974 President and CEO Scott Bridge Company S. Paul Shailendra BCE 2001 President, SG Property Services Stacie Sire BCE 1996 Director and Chief Engineer, Propulsion Structures, Systems and Production Engineering, Boeing Deborah K. Staudinger BCE 1978 Partner, Hogan Lovells Damian K. Taylor BSCE 2001 Senior Vice President Arch Street Capital Advisors Michael R. Van Epp BSCE 2003 Principal, EnvironCapital Richard E. Zalesky BCE 1978 Retired, Chevron Downstream & Chemicals
PHOTO: JESS HUNT-RALSTON
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THE JESSE W. MASON BUILDING, OPENED IN 1969 AND RENOVATED IN 2013, WITH THE NEW SEVEN BRIDGES PLAZA. THIS REIMAGINED COURTYARD SPACE FEATURES A REPRESENTATION OF A FAMOUS PROBLEM IN MATHEMATICS BASED ON THE LAYOUT OF THE CITY OF KONIGSBERG, PRUSSIA, WHERE FOUR LAND MASSES WERE CONNECTED BY SEVEN BRIDGES. THE QUESTION WAS, COULD A PERSON WALK THROUGH THE CITY AND CROSS EACH BRIDGE ONLY ONCE? IN ANSWERING THAT QUESTION, LEONHARD EULER LAID THE FOUNDATION FOR WHAT BECAME KNOWN AS GRAPH THEORY.
Printed on Rolland Enterprises 100 percent recycled Enviro Print 80-pound cover and Enviro Print 80-pound text paper. Certified Ancient Forest Friendly and by UL as environmentally friendly, this paper is processed without chlorine and made with renewable energy. Compared to using 100 percent virgin fiber, we saved:
PHOTO: LUKE XINJING XU
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