The Grainger College of Engineering
Illinois Center for Transportation

Awards and honors

2/1/2016

Several ICT investigators and students have recently been recognized for their academic and research efforts: 

  • UIUC Professor Jeff Roelser was elected President of the International Society of Concrete Pavements for a two-year term starting February 1, 2016.
  • ICT/IDOT project “Improvement for Determining the Axial Capacity of Drilled Shafts in Shale in Illinois” was one of only ten structures-related projects selected as “High Value” by AASHTO and was highlighted during a poster session at the 2016 TRB Annual Meeting. The project personnel are UIUC Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s professor Timothy Stark, professor emeritus James Long, and Ph.D. candidate Ahmed Baghdady.
  • Matt Mueller, Engineer of Tests at the Illinois Department of Transportation, now retired, received the Illinois Bituminous Paving Conference’s Leadership in Bituminous Engineering Award for his vision and leadership in the field of asphalt concrete.
  • Abdul Z. Dahhan, vice president of engineering at Chicago Testing Laboratory Inc. and former IDOT Bureau Chief of Materials, received the Illinois Bituminous Paving Conference’s Engineer/Technical Contribution Award for leading asphalt concrete sustainability in IDOT’s District 1.
  • Also at the conference, UIUC Ph.D. candidate Rebekah Yang was awarded the Student Research Award for her work in developing the Tollway pavement life-cycle assessment tool.
  • ICT director Imad Al-Qadi and UIUC research associate professor Hasan Ozer were co-recipients of the conference’s Innovative Research Award for their work on the IL-SCB test and flexibility index.
  • Three UIUC CEE students received the 2015 Student of the Year Award from the Department of Transportation University Transportation Center:
  1. M.S. student Daniel King (advisor Jeff Roesler)–Center for Highway Pavement Preservation
  2. Ph.D. student Daniel Castaneda (advisor David Lange)–Research on Concrete Applications for Sustainable Transportation (Re-CAST) Center
  3. Ph.D. student Andrew Lovell (advisor Chris Barkan)– NuRAIL Center
  • Mahdi Pour-Rouholamin and Mohammad Jalayer, doctoral candidates at Auburn University’s Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, were each awarded the 2015 Gulf Region Intelligent Transportation Society Scholarship. The scholarship recognizes outstanding students based on academic performance, extracurricular involvement, and work experience.
  • Yanfeng Ouyang, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Illinois, was selected, along with his grad students, as finalist for the 2015 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. The prize emphasizes good writing, strong analytical content, and verifiable practice successes.
  • Jaime Hernandez successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, “Contact Stress Prediction between Deformable Tires and Pavements at Various Operating Conditions Using a Validated Finite Element Model” under the supervision of his advisor, professor Imad Al-Qadi, on November 10, 2015. Jaime is now serving as a postdoc research associate at ICT. Congrats, Jaime!