When Joe Brown went to India last summer, he was hoping to collect samples that could help answer some questions he’d been thinking about for a while. His years studying sanitation and global health had given him the idea that the open sewers and overflowing latrines common in the dense cities of the developing world could be linked with disease through an unusual mechanism: airborne transmission of pathogens.
Tech Environmental Engineering Professor Armistead “Ted” Russell has traveled the world, including China, India and Minneapolis, studying air quality and its impacts on urban life. He is also part of a team of scientists, policymakers and industrialists working with a U.S. National Science Foundation Sustainability Research Network to build better cities.
The National Science Foundation has funded a new collaboration between three School of Civil and Environmental Engineering researchers that could make finding damage in bridges or buildings easier and help reduce life-threatening failures. If successful, the team will be able to produce more reliable predictions about how structures behave, and their algorithm will be able to do the predictions much more quickly than current practice for structural damage and deterioration assessments.
A high-resolution model of how soil erosion impacts the carbon cycle of a small South Carolina watershed may help explain an apparent imbalance in the world’s carbon budget. Explaining that apparent imbalance is necessary for understanding and predicting the course of global climate change.
Two School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. students have secured National Science Foundation fellowships, some of the most competitive and prestigious funding for the nation’s graduate students. Georgene Geary and Laura Mast join a long list of the brightest and most promising of the School’s students to win the funding. This year, NSF chose to support fewer than one in eight applicants.
Two assistant professors in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering have won one of the nation’s premiere grants and the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for junior faculty, the Early Career Development award. Chloe Arson and Phanish Suryanarayana learned of their selection in early January for what are known simply as CAREER awards. The grants recognize the top educators and researchers in the country, those who “exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research,” according to the NSF.
The National Science Foundation has awarded Iris Tien $499,920 for a three-year project that will develop new computer models of infrastructure systems and the connections between them. The idea is to create a model that can be used for any infrastructure system — water, power, transportation, or communications, for example — and takes into account each component of the system as well as how the system interacts with other infrastructure.
School Chair Reginald DesRoches will join the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for Engineering this fall. Engineering Directorate officials invited DesRoches to serve a three-year term starting in October, at the committee’s fall meeting.
How will we build the cities of the future in a sustainable way? A new National Science Foundation-funded research network will connect scientists at nine universities with infrastructure groups, public policy experts, and industry partners to reimagine cities. Georgia Tech will be an anchor of the $12 million network, which will be led by the University of Minnesota, and School of Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Ted Russell will serve as a co-director.
An $18.5 million investment from the National Science Foundation will help researchers at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech — along with colleagues at Arizona State, New Mexico State, and the University of California, Davis — tap into the lessons nature teaches us and, potentially, revolutionize geotechnical engineering in the process.
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