A year ago, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering seniors Samantha Becker and Shannon Evanchec were convinced they could change lives in rural villages around the globe. They were about to sell InVenture Prize judges on their antimicrobial cup and lotus flower, which uses copper to kill germs in household water in places like India where contamination with E. coli and other microbes is a significant problem. Now Becker and Evanchec have graduated, and they’re working full-time to turn their creation into a business they call TruePani.
Suzanne Shank still keeps two textbooks on her bookshelf from her days as a civil engineering undergrad at Georgia Tech. From her classes on differential equations and mechanics of deformable bodies, those two books remind her of a key lesson she learned in those days: “I was much stronger when I reached out and relied on the support of my peers. I realized I could only go so far on my own.”
Michael Rodgers and one of his former Ph.D. students have won the Thomas C. Evans Instructional Paper Award for their work on assessing how well students learn complex engineering information.
The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents named Kim D. Jones a regents professor this fall. He was one of 11 outstanding faculty members throughout the Texas A&M system the board honored this year.
Georgia Tech alumnus K.P. Reddy will help engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti spin off five new companies from its in-house startup accelerator in 2017. The firm announced a partnership Dec. 16 with The Combine, which Reddy co-founded to bridge the gap between startup and stand-alone company.
The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s alumni advisory board has installed six new members, adding experience in finance law, social media, airport operations, and real-estate development as well as engineering. The new members of the External Advisory Board graduated from the late 1970s to the 2000s and join two dozen other alumni who help guide the School’s leadership on everything from academics to fundraising.
Emmy Montanye brought practical advice by the bucket-load to the Hyatt Distinguished Alumni Leadership Speaker Series Sept. 20. She used lessons from her experiences to offer students a guide to turning their engineering education into a fruitful career, sharing what she called five “buckets” of skills she’s picked up through her career paired with a practical example. Ultimately, they all came down to one thing: relationships.
When Habib Fathi was studying for his Ph.D. in civil engineering from Georgia Tech, he was at a professional crossroads, debating which path to take. One obvious path: go the route of academia to continue his research and teach. The other path — arguably more risky — meant venturing out as an entrepreneur and forming a company based on his years of work and study of 3-D computer modeling and building construction.
What does it mean to be a leader? We asked some of our most-successful alumni and a few of our faculty members to answer that question and to put leadership in the context of our work as civil and environmental engineers.
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Mason Building, 790 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA 30332-0355
Phone: 404-894-2201
Fax: 404-894-2278