Transportation great David Lippert continues stoking his passions

Finding your passion isn’t always easy. In fact, it takes a lifetime for some to discover it. But for David Lippert, Illinois Center for Transportation’s senior sustainability implementation engineer, a mere peek out the rear window of his parents’ Chevy Impala sparked that desire.

As a tike, Lippert would make the long drives with his parents, who traveled around the country to his father’s rural route mail carrier conventions as an annual vacation.

“This is like the early ‘60s, when the interstate era was pretty much off and running and booming,” he said. “You’d come upon these huge construction projects, which stopped traffic, that I wanted to see, whether it was blasting or whatever was going on.”

“I thought it was pretty neat stuff,” he added. “I was always interested in building stuff.”

Flash forward to Nov. 18, 2019, when Lippert was awarded the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Staff Award for Excellence at the M.T. Geoffrey Yeh Student Center, which was filled with his colleagues praising his hardworking efforts.

All the while, Lippert could only think how very “humbling” the honor was for him.

“I appreciate it,” Lippert said. “I don’t think anybody works for awards, but it’s nice to receive ‘em ― that’s for sure.”

And boy, what a career Lippert’s leading.

Looking in the review mirror to his Balyki High School days, Lippert was one of the few students in his mere class of 25 peers with a passion for math and science.

“The chemistry was a very small group. Physics was a very small group,” Lippert said. “But come senior math class, I was it,” he said with a laugh.

Lippert landed at Western Illinois University and as a freshman, he asked himself one very important question: “What programs are out there?”

He chose the pre-engineering program, which offered a dual bachelor’s degree through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

After graduation, Lippert had a brief stent serving Mason County as the assistant superintendent of highways. But pretty quickly, he was at a fork in the road. It was move elsewhere to find a position or go back to school and pursue a master’s.

Lippert chose the latter, studying under the king of the road himself, UIUC professor emeritus Marshall Thompson.

“I learned a lot under Marshall,” he said. “He had some good projects working on IDOT’s (Illinois Department of Transportation) full-depth pavement design efforts at the time and a little Air Force work, too.”

After turning the tassel, Lippert looked no further for work than at the agency in which he spent so much time learning under in his graduate journey.

In 1984, he began what would become a near three-decade-long career starting as a research engineer in IDOT’s Bureau of Materials and Physical Research, which are now two separate bureaus.

Lippert went on to serve in various positions on the bureau’s research and materials sides. He continued working his way up the corporate ladder to bureau chief. And in that time, he began serving a multitude of projects.

His proudest effort?

Mechanistic pavement design, which had Lippert and his co-workers examining the science behind pavement selection for use on Illinois roadways.

“One of my jobs was to come up with the conceptual design policies and procedure for consideration,” he said. “That included everything from your soil inputs to how you’re handling the assumptions on strengths of materials and that sort of thing.”

The result?

“We literally took about a foot of research and through a number of policy decisions, while working with the industry, we got it down to a 60- to 80-page draft design procedure,” Lippert said while laughing. “That was a big effort.”

That’s not all of Lippert’s proudest accomplishments at IDOT, though. In fact, one of his biggest passions is still broiling well after his 2013 retirement, and that’s his love of barbecuing.

The hobby got serious when furlough days were implemented under former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn for state government administrative employees.

“My thought was, ‘I’ll be danged if I’m going to be sitting around and moping around at home,’” Lippert joked. “‘I’m going to do something.’” His neighbors spurring him on saying, “‘Oh, you’ve seen those barbecue contests on TV! You ought to start doing some of those!’”

“So I thought, ‘Well, it looks like I’m going to have some time to devout to this,’” Lippert said.

After developing a line of barbecue sauces and receiving several awards, including three grand championships at Springfield’s Old Capital Blues and BBQ, Lippert joked that he still has “a little fun with it.”

In 2014, after enjoying a little of his retirement and knocking off the honey-do list, Lippert had an itch to get back into his original passion ― transportation.

“An opportunity came for a position here at ICT,” Lippert said. “I felt a little different being in the interview chair again,” he joked. “But I got the position as a senior sustainability research engineer.”

In his time at ICT, Lippert’s been very active in developing reports for IDOT concentrated in sustainability and pavement-performance monitoring.

Perhaps his proudest achievement at ICT thus far was helping establish pavement performance with results from the Illinois Flexibility Index Test, which measures asphalt mixes’ durability.

“It was trying to establish that link (between lab and field tests),” Lippert said. “Getting that information, getting the reports put together so that link could be established and used, and coming up with where’s the specification cut off . . . that to me was pretty interesting.”

“To me, the development of I-FIT was one of the better studies here at the university.” Lippert added. “It was nice seeing the need for this work while with the state (and) then the results (developed) at ICT.”

An up-and-coming project Lippert’s lending a hand in is the conceptual design of the proposed Illinois Autonomous and Connected Track, a high-speed autonomous and connected freight and multimodal mobility track anticipating construction near ICT on approximately 430 acres at the former Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois.

“We’re working toward developing a detailed plan for contractors to bid on,” Lippert said. “Once that comes to be, I think it’s going to be very exciting to see what technology can do,” he added. “There is going to be some very interesting work here at the university for years to come.”

Three decades after Lippert launched his career, it’s exciting projects, such as I-ACT, that continue to fuel his desire to pave a better future for the taxpayers of Illinois.

“I always think, ‘What’s the taxpayer getting?’ (What’s the) bang for the buck?’” he said. “That’s the whole job of engineering, research and the university’s and IDOT’s relationship. It’s with what resources we have can we do better?”

Lippert continues to gaze outside the driver’s window, peering out and gaining inspiration to make our roadways all the safer.