Department of

Civil and Environmental Engineering


NEWS & EVENTS (IN DETAIL)

 

November 13, 2014

The 2nd Annual Penn State CEE Alumni Panel Discussion titled "Career Paths: Personal Experiences of CEE Alumni" is November 13, 2014 at 7 p.m. in 22 Deike Building. The event is sponsored by the PSU ASCE Student Chapter and the CEE Alumni Society.

Panelists include:

  • Mark Alpert, CH2M
  • Brett Brenize, Gannett Fleming
  • Ed Gannon, Penn State
  • Tracy Hollida, Michael Baker
  • Dave Kaufman, PA American Water
  • Jack Raudenbush, Raudenbush Engineering
  • Rick Seitz, Alexander Construction
  • Rachel Tereska, NTM Engineering

October 14, 2014

Environmental engineering graduate student Hiroyuki Kashima wins best paper award in the 2014 Water Environment Federation Student Paper Competition.

WEF Student Paper Competition

Penn State Bridges to Prosperity team

September 17, 2014

The Penn State student chapter of Bridges to Prosperity attended the second Annual Bridge Builder Conference hosted by Bridges to Prosperity in Winter Park, Colorado, held September 12 - 14, 2014.

Penn State Bridges to Prosperity won teh Bridge Team of the Year Award. Penn State was the only school selected for the award out of over 15 Bridges to Prosperity (B2P) university chapters. In addition, Penn State B2P received an honorable mention award for social media and Jen Kearny, chapter president, received a research award.

The students and technical adivser that attended the conference are as pictured; back row, left: Jake Rausch, Steve Mezzacappa, Mr. Garrett Hoffman with Figg Bridge Engineers, Matt Malencia,in front, left: Hannah Greider, Jen Kearney, Yulissa Guerrero, and Allie Hoffman.

September 12, 2014

Dr. Jack Matson, professor emeritus of environmental engineering, and Dr. Darrell Velegol, distinguished professor of chemical engineering, will speak at a conference sponsored by the Economic Perspectives and International Cooperation Congress (EPICC) in Lorient, France held September 18 and 19.

EPICC conference article

August 28, 2014

bridge span across ravine

The student group, Bridges to Prosperity, spent this summer in Panama building a bridge to support a local community. The suspended pedestrian bridge leading to Caimital has a 76 meter span. The bridge connects the people of Caimital to Penonome, which is the local capital of Cocle, a province in Panama. The community members need to get to Penonome in order to access markets, higher education, and doctors. The Caimital side of the bridge has a standard gravity anchor with three tiers. The anchor on the Penonome side of the bridge was redesigned as a hybrid rock anchor since rock was struck during excavation. This side has two tiers. The large number of tiers are required in order to meet the two meter spacing requirement between the bridge decking and high water level when the river floods. The footbridge is built over a huge ravine with a river in the bottom. The river floods often during the rainy season, which isolates the community. The existing road bridge flooded once while the team was working on construction on the Penonome side of the bridge; they waited several hours for the large trees and debris to travel down the river and then walked through rushing water above their knees in order to get home that evening. The water comes hard and fast whenever it rains a great deal upstream. The advisors for the trip were Dr. Jay Regan, Dr. Alfonso Mejia and Department Head Staff Assistant Devon Johnson.

long view of bridge span bridge team

Bridges to Prosperity students photographed on the anchor of the bridge in photo to the right are from left to right: Jake Rausch, Danielle Berman, Matt Malencia, Yulissa Guerrero, Steve Mezzacappa, Allie Hoffman, Zach Makarewicz, Eric McCall, Nicolai Zoretich, and Jen Kearney.

May 5, 2014

Eric Donnell and Gordon Warn have been selected as an ASCE 2013 Outstanding Reviewer for ASCE Publications. Dr. Donnell was selected by Chris Hendrickson, editor of ASCE's Journal of Transportation Engineering and Dr. Warn was selected by Sherif El-Tawil, editor of ASCE's Journal of Structural Engineering.

April 23, 2014

Civil engineering graduate student Mehmet Unal receives award at the Graduate Exhibition held April 6, 2014, at the HUB-Robeson Center along with three other engineeering students.

Mehmet placed third for "Balancing Tradeoffs: Modeling to Support Post-Earthquake Decision Making and Resource Allocation of Distributed Bridge-Transportation Networks."

Graduate Exhibition article

April 18, 2014

Four Penn State engineering students have been named winners in the 2014 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, including environmental engineering graduate students Rebecca Edwards and Andrew Kreider.

Read the full story: http://news.psu.edu/link/pWDb2dtC

April 18, 2014

Xuan Yu and Yu Zhang, Ph.D. candidates in Water Resource Engineering at Penn State under the supervision of Dr. Chris Duffy, have received a CSDMS (Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System) 2014 student scholarship. They have received the CSDMS 2014 student scholarship for their contribution to the research of landscape evolution and hydrological modeling. This award will support them attending the CSDMS 2014 Annual Meeting.

Xuan Yu focuses on the development and application of the Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Model (PIHM) on forest management, solute transport, and glacier retreat. Recently, he used the state-of-the-art statistical methods to improve the quantification of uncertainty in hydrologic modeling and water resources assessment. He will present his research work with title of “Uncertainty and Sensitivity in Surface Dynamics Modeling” in the CSDMS 2014 Annual Meeting.

Yu Zhang’s research interests are the hydrological and morphodynamic modeling. He developed a new 3D landscape evolution model (LE-PIHM) which fully coupled hydrological and morphological processes. Unlike other models, this model considered the feedback between groundwater flow and landscape evolution processes. He will present “Fully-Coupled Hydrologic Processes for Modeling Landscape Evolution” in the CSDMS 2014 Annual Meeting.

March 17, 2014

Gordon Warn receives 2014 NSF Career Award. This award recognizes junior faculty who have shown exceptional promise in teaching and research.

2014 NSF CAREER article

March 14, 2014

Rachel Brennan has received the 2014 Premier Teaching Award from the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society. this award recognizes and rewards an individual whose contributions to Engineering education or the art of teaching are of exceptional quality. This year's award ceremony will be on April 1, 2014.

College of Engineering's PSEAS Premier Teaching Award

February 21, 2014

faculty and students at awards presentation

Three students in the Geotechnical and Materials Engineering group in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Penn State were recognized as scholarship recipients at a seminar presentation on February 21, 2014. Pezhouhan Tavassoti Kheiry received the CMT Laboratories Graduate Scholarship in Civil Engineering and both Omid Ghasemi Fare and Jared Wright (bottom: left to right) received the Leo P. Russell Graduate Fellowship in Civil Engineering. The awards were presented by Dr. Tong Qiu, Dr. Farshad Rajabipour, Dr. Shelley Stoffels and Dr. Prasenjit Basu (top: left to right).

 

February 20, 2014

Penn State has been named an ACI Outstanding University for 2013 by the American Concrete Institute. The ACI Award for University Student Activities was initiated to recognized universities that have participated in ACI-related activities. Only 13 universities are receiving this award for 2013.

 

January 28, 2014

Swagata Banerjee, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Penn State, conducts research on the combined impacts of flood and earthquake on bridge stability.

Article Risk modeling for bridges simulates multihazard scenarios

 

January 27, 2014

Dr. Peggy Johnson was selected as this year's recipient of the Howard B. Palmer Faculty Mentoring Award.

Johnson's mentoring award article

 

January 15, 2014

Gordon Warn, assistant professor of civil engineering, has won an NSF CAREER award.

 

January 14, 2014

For David Pattillo, endowing a scholarship at Penn State allowed him to say "thank you" in more ways than one. "It was a way to recognize my parents and what they did for me and a way to recognize my roots," said Pattillo about creating the Howard and Aileen Pattilo Scholarship in Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Penn State Live article on new Pattillo scholarship

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