New staffers 'excited' to play vital roles

All it took was one foot in the door for McCall Macomber and Uthman Mohamed Ali to be over-the-moon excited about the Illinois Center for Transportation’s transformational research efforts.

For Macomber, that excitement reached new heights when ICT Director Imad Al-Qadi asked her to join the team as a technical communications specialist.

“I was very excited when I got the phone call,” Macomber said.

“We’d been playing phone tag up until that point, and I was at Barnes & Noble when I got the call,” she said while laughing. “I was really excited, but I had to keep it cool because I was in public and there were people around me.”

Macomber is fresh off a five-year stint at Common Ground Research Networks, where she served as the head of journal production.

“I managed a small team and a portfolio of academic journals, overseeing all stages of the production process,” Macomber said.

Research topics varied from aging, climate change, sports and even inclusive museum studies.

“We published a little bit of everything,” Macomber added.

The Freeport, Ill. native earned her bachelor’s in English from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign of which she “graduated and then never left,” Macomber joked.

For Macomber, the English major was an easy selection given her complete adoration of reading and writing.

“I always knew that’s what I enjoyed doing and that’s where my strengths were,” she said.

Mohamed Ali, ICT’s new research engineer, was also able to pinpoint his strong suits early on in life given his family’s strong background in the trucking industry.

“My family was always in that transportation sector. They either talked about the big trucks or the state of the roads,” Mohamed Ali said, “so my choice was either of the two. But they (his family) told me to go to school, so my opportunity now is to learn the most effective ways to fix the roads.”

Mohamed Ali hails from East Africa, growing up predominately in Kenya and Uganda.

“I’m originally from Somalia,” he said, “but I was always moving.”

He did as his family requested, earning a bachelor’s in civil and environmental engineering from Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville, Tenn. But that only inspired him to continue learning and in the fall of 2017, Mohamed Ali pushed on to pursue a graduate degree.

He applied to several schools, but a visit to UIUC’s campus and ICT’s research facilities secured his decision.

“The first day I walked into ICT, I knew this was the kind of place that I wanted to stick around,” he said.

He worked as a graduate assistant before earning his master’s — also in civil and environmental engineering — earlier in May.

“My projects here at ICT were always exciting because they were implementable and involved collaboration with the best minds in the profession,” Mohamed Ali said.

Now taking on a leadership role himself, Mohamed Ali will primarily oversee the ins and outs of the lab he’s come to know so well.

“I’ll make sure students get adequate training for the different equipment,” he said. “More importantly, I’ll calibrate the equipment to make sure it’s working and giving accurate and repeatable results.”

Mohamed Ali is also leading the new Industry Affiliates initiative for ICT, where industry leaders have “access to our advanced testing” or the ability to conduct “third-party testing,” he explained.

Despite their very different responsibilities, both Macomber and Mohamed Ali are set to play vital roles in continuing to make ICT a premier research facility. Please join us in giving them a warm welcome!