The Grainger College of Engineering
Illinois Center for Transportation

Awards and Honors

8/1/2016

The achievements of several ICT investigators and students have recently been recognized with the following awards:

  1. Professor Timothy Stark was named an Excellence Faculty Scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in March, 2016. Professor Stark had also been named to UIUC’s List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students in Fall 2015.
  2. Professor Erol Tutumluer was named the 2016 Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) Scholar award recipient, the highest academic award issued to an individual in higher education by China’s Ministry of Education. He was competitively chosen to serve as the founding Director and Principal Investigator of the Yangtze River Scholar Innovation Team with the CSU’s School of Civil Engineering with a focus exclusively on heavy-haul railway engineering structures.  His role will be to give them direction and provide academic and scholarly support.
  3. IDOT/ICT project “Testing Protocols to Ensure Performance of High Asphalt Binder Replacement Mixes Using RAP & RAS” was selected by the AASHTO Research Advisory Committee (RAC) as a Sweet 16 High Value Research projects for 2016 and a winning project for Region 3. The project developed and established an Illinois modified version of the semi-circular bend (IL-SCB) test and determined a flexibility index (FI), known together as the Illinois Flexibility Index Test (I-FIT).
  4. UIUC CEE graduate research assistant Jose Rivera-Perez was awarded the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship, which aims to advance the transportation workforce by attracting the brightest minds to the field through education, research, and development. Jose is currently pursuing his master’s degree in civil engineering under the supervision of Professor Imad Al-Qadi and is expected to graduate in May 2017.
  5. Students Quang N.V. Tran, Homin Song, and Hajin Choi were awarded the ACI-James Instruments Scholarship Award at the 2016 ACI Spring Convention held April 16th, 2016 at the Milwaukee Convention Center in Milwaukee, WI, USA. The title of their paper was “Investigating Concrete Setting and Hardening Using Leaky Raleigh Wave Measurements.” All three students are supervised by Professor John Popovics in CEE at Illinois.
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In ICT staff news, Kristi Anderson, financial operations manager; Waad Ayoub, senior communications coordinator; and Nathan Townsend, research program coordinator, recently completed a series of 12 courses with emphasis on various aspects of the sponsored programs lifecycle, starting with where to find funding and ending with project closeout. These courses were sponsored by the Sponsored Projects and Research Compliance working group, the Office of the Assistant Vice President for Business and Finance, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. They covered topics such as proposal preparation, award negotiation and execution, subawards management, cost sharing, and hiring and managing personnel were thoroughly discussed within the course.