Emily Williamson, recent CvEEN Ph.D. graduate, has been selected to receive the 2023 Wood Engineering Achievement Award for Young Engineer. A presentation of her award will be held at this year’s Forest Products Society‘s International Conference from June 6-8 in Morgantown, West Virginia.

The Wood Engineering Achievement Award recognizes accomplishments and innovations in the discipline of wood engineering including structures, structural elements, building codes, consensus standards, design procedures and education.

The Award alternates each year between three categories: Lifetime Achievement, Young Engineer, and Engineering Innovation. The 2023 category is Young Engineer, and we’re happy to congratulate our very own Emily Williamson on achieving the honorable distinction.

Williamson earned her Ph.D. in structural engineering in Spring of 2023 after successfully defending her dissertation, titled “Mass Timber Frame with Mass Timber Buckling Restrained Braces or Seismically Resilient Mass Timber Buildings.” Her research, under the mentorship of Dr. Pantelides, focused on the design and testing of a mass timber frame with timber buckling restrained braces. Her project aimed to develop a ductile timber lateral force resisting system to promote the resilience of timber buildings during seismic events.

She begins working as a Project Engineer at Reaveley Engineers in Salt Lake City, Utah, this Fall. She is excited to continue the problem solving and critical thinking involved in structural engineering and is pleased to pursue her passion for promoting the use of mass timber as a structural material.

PCoE recently underwent the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s 18-month accreditation process.

With the site visit taking place in Fall of 2021, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering received official word in September 2022 that its Bachelor’s degree  in Construction Engineering earned accreditation status, making it the first Construction program in Utah with ABET’s seal of approval.

Sought worldwide, ABET’s voluntary peer-review process is highly respected because it adds critical value to academic programs in the technical disciplines, where quality, precision and safety are of the utmost importance.

While most colleges include Construction Engineering under the Civil and Environmental umbrella, CvEEN puts a more focused effort in training these essential engineers in the rapidly growing field.

Construction Engineering at the University of Utah is a hybrid program that prepares students to enter this exciting field. Students take courses in both civil engineering fundamentals—such as structural principles, site analysis, foundations, computer-assisted design, evaluation and testing, and materials—and instruction in construction courses, such as those related to contracting, project management, and laws and regulations.

CvEEN is proud to house the only ABET-accredited Construction Engineering program in the state.

Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. student Yirong Zhou was recently awarded a scholarship from the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Winners of the $500 scholarships are selected based on outstanding scholarship, work experience, and activity within their student section of ITE.

Zhou’s research focuses on data-driven transportation engineering, including operation research, optimization, machine learning, and spatio-temporal analysis and simulation.

His Ph.D. advisor has been CvEEN associate professor Dr. Xiaoyue Cathy Liu. Like Zhou, Dr. Liu’s research interests lie in sustainable transportation, in which she has extensive research and service.

Zhou is an exemplary CvEEN graduate student. He’s been involved in several projects sponsored by National Science Foundation,  Strategic Highway Research Program 2 (SHRP 2), National Institute for Transportation and Communities, and Mountain-Plains Consortium.

CvEEN’s transportation engineering program places an emphasis on the applications of state-of-art advancements concerning planning, design, operations, maintenance, and assessment of transportation systems. Students conduct research in the area of the transportation system design and modeling, address contemporary issues such as shared mobility, vehicle electrification and automation, and develop excellent problem-solving skill sets.

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering team developed and demonstrated system that provides damage detection and diagnoses

Two CvEEN Ph.D. students and Assistant Professor Peter Zhu conducted a field demonstration on the UTA TRAX blue and green lines with Utah Transit Authority and Federal Transit Administration representatives in attendance.

The infrastructure Sensing and Experimental Mechanics (iSEM) team held the demonstration May 2023 on UTA TRAX’s blue and green lines. Moein Ramezanpourkami (Ph.D. student), Yuning Wu (Ph.D. student), and Peter Zhu (PI), developed and deployed a polarized infrared camera-based prototype system on a UTA train.

The system performed rail track condition assessment and diagnostics, providing reliable damage detection and diagnosis for timber and concrete sleepers with an inspection speed of up to 35 mph.

Once installed on operating trains, this system — developed by CvEEN students and Professor Zhu — will enable big data analytics for network scale real-time track condition assessment.

The team collaborated with an Amsterdam-based startup company, AutoFill Technology, Inc., and UTA on this FTA-funded research project, demonstrating the amount of project management, communication, and planning required of students and Zhu.

The project and its real-world application is just one of the many ways CvEEN students get unique, hands-on experience in the fields the college prepares them to enter.

Professor Zhu demonstrates system

Three Department of Civil and Environmental Engineer researchers recently received the ASCE Construction Institute’s 2023 Thomas Fitch Rowland Prize for the paper “Automated Framework to Translate Rebar Spatial Information from GPR into BIM,” which was originally published in Journal of Construction Engineering and Management in October 2021. A formal award ceremony will be held later this year.

The researchers included:

• Dr. Zhongming Xiang, who earned his PhD from the department in 2021;
• Abbas Rashidi, Assistant Professor of Construction Engineering;
• and Professor Gaby Ou, former Assistant Professor for the department.

Their research integrated image processing, machine learning, and BIM development algorithms to automate the process of translating spatial information of embedded rebar scanned by Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) scanners into BIM models. The automated framework can significantly improve the current state-of-practice for as-built modeling of buildings containing both surface and embedded elements.

The project highlights how CvEEN graduate students get to work on ground-breaking research along with their professors while gaining national recognition.

Dr. Xiang, after earning his PhD from our very own department at the U, is currently working at Stantec Consulting as a Senior Transmission Line Engineer.

Read the researchers’ full publication, or browse CvEEN’s various research opportunities.