ICT investigators and students receive awards

The following ICT investigators and students have recently been recognized.

• Professor Imad Al-Qadi is now an affiliate professor with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. KTH has a partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to collaborate on issues of international importance.

• Professor William Buttlar was elected at Large to the Board of Directors of the Association of Asphalt Paving Technologists. Also, Provost Ilesanmi Adesida recently appointed Buttlar to the Campus MOOC Implementation and Policy Team, which is a broad group of campus leaders who will steer University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign activities in the area of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)—particularly the university’s recent partnership with Coursera.
• Doctoral student Yu Qian is the recipient of the Yee Memorial Fund Fellowship. The fellowship honors the late Dr. Warren Yee, who received his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1943, and supports Chinese graduate students in the College of Engineering. This year, special consideration was given to the most successful students from inner province (non-coastal) universities in China. Qian, who hails from Zhenjiang in Jiansu Province, will receive $5,000 for the 2013-14 school year.
• Three ICT investigators were the first recipients of Innovation Grants from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Faculty from the department apply for the grants with proposals, and winning projects are funded at approximately $30,000 each.  Professor Youssef Hashash will develop a unique method for granular material simulation, which was inspired by watching his daughter play the popular game Angry Birds. Additionally, Assistant Professor Paramita Mondal and Associate Professor John Popovics are taking a new approach to the study of concrete—by examining it on a microscopic scale. They will study heat-damaged concrete to determine how its properties are different from normal concrete.
• The following ICT investigators have been included in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Fall 2012 List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students: Bassem Andrawes, William Buttlar, Larry Fahnestock, Marcelo Garcia, Liang Liu, Paramita Mondal, Scott Olson, John Popovics, and Erol Tutumluer.