CEE faculty members appointed to endowed positions
Faculty members Sheng Dai and Jennifer Kaiser have been selected for appointments to endowed positions within the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Sheng Dai, Ph.D., P.E., is an associate professor and group coordinator in Geosystems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He earned his BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees from Tongji U and Georgia Tech, and worked at the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy as an ORISE postdoc fellow. He is currently the Georgia Mining Association Early Career Professor at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a faculty member in the Ocean Science and Engineering, and holds a courtesy appointment at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech.
Dr. Dai's group addresses the resilience and sustainability in energy and the natural environment through studying energy geotechnics and nature inspired engineering. His research has been funded by federal funding agencies (DOE, NSF, NASA, DOT), national labs, and industry. He is an associated editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, an editorial advisor of Geomechanics for Energy and Environment, and serves on the Pressure Core Advisory Board for the U.S. Geological Survey, the GOM2 Marine Test Technical Advisory Committee for UT/DOE, the National Gas Hydrate Program for NETL, and the Task Force Leader of TC308 Energy Geotechnics of ISSMGE.
Energy geotechnics, Nature inspired engineering, Flow in porous media, Geomechanics, Granular dynamics
2025 Early Career Researcher Award, USUCGER
2024 Emerging Leaders Program (ELP), EVPR/Georgia Tech
2023 Interdisciplinary Research Award, CEE/Georgia Tech
2023 Woodruff Academic Leadership Fellows, ME/Georgia Tech
2022 CMMI’s Game Changer Academies (CGCA), NSF
2022 Jim Pope CREATE-X Faculty Fellowship, Georgia Tech
2021 Certificate of Appreciation, Association of Environmental Engineers and Scientists
2021 Appreciation Award, Journal of Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment
2020 CAREER Award, NSF
2017 Spotlight of Research, featured in Fire in the Ice Newsletter, US Department of Energy
2014 ORISE Fellowship, US Department of Energy
2013 ORISE Fellowship, US Department of Energy
2017 Bill Schutz Junior Faculty Teaching Award, CEE/Georgia Tech
2016 Class of 1969 Teaching Fellows, Georgia Tech
2013 George F. Sowers Distinguished Graduate Student Award, Geosystems/Georgia Tech
Faculty members Sheng Dai and Jennifer Kaiser have been selected for appointments to endowed positions within the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
In a breakthrough study, a cross-disciplinary team of Georgia Tech researchers discovered a previously unknown class of bacterial proteins that play a crucial role in the formation and stability of methane clathrates, which trap methane gas, preventing it from escaping and bubbling up into the atmosphere.