ICT student spotlight: Yu Qian

Yu Qian, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was recently honored with the Yee Memorial Fellowship. He is advised by Professor Erol Tutumluer and expects to finish his PhD in May, 2014, with the goal of being appointed to a faculty position.

Qian came to Illinois in 2010 and has focused on railroad infrastructure, ballast behavior, discrete element method (DEM) simulation, high speed rail, and geosynthetics. Currently, he is assisting Tutumluer with the project “Discrete Element Modeling of Railroad Ballast Behavior,” which is sponsored by the Federal Railroad Administration.

In December 2012, Qian was honored with a top paper award at the China-United States Doctoral Forum on Transportation Science and Engineering, which was hosted by the Harbin Institute of Technology. In 2011, he was accepted into the “professor training in asphalt technology” from the National Center for Asphalt Technology and was the 2010 recipient of the Harry R. Hanley Memorial Scholarship from the Illinois Asphalt Pavement Association.

When he isn’t focused on his studies, Qian enjoys traveling.