The Grainger College of Engineering
Illinois Center for Transportation

Awards and honors

5/1/2014

The achievements of several ICT investigators and students have recently been recognized with the following awards: 

  • Timothy Stark, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Illinois, and his former Ph.D. student, Manzoor Hussain, received the Richard S. Ladd Standards Development Award from ASTM’s Committee D18 on Soil and Rock in recognition of their work in revising ASTM Standard Designation D6467, “Standard Test Method for Torsional Ring Shear Test to Determine Drained Residual Shear Strength of Cohesive Soils.”
  • ICT director Imad Al-Qadi received the Francis C. Turner Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers. The award recognizes Al-Qadi’s national and international leadership in the field of transportation engineering research and education, as well as his many outstanding contributions to the advancement of the knowledge and practice of pavement engineering and sustainability.
  • Students Angeli Gamez and Punit Singhvi were selected as recipients of scholarships from the Illinois Asphalt Pavement Association.
  • Student Ibrahim Abuawad received the 2013 Arab American Association for Engineers and Architects scholarship.
  • Piyush Chaunsali received the Chester P. Siess Graduate Award and Spring 2014 Conference Travel Award.
  • Two ICT/IDOT projects were recognized with the High Impact Project Award at the 100th annual Transportation and Highway Engineering (THE) conference in March: The first project was the “Highway Safety Manual Lead State Peer-to-Peer Workshop” (R27-089): Principal investigator was Yanfeng Ouyang of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chair of the project’s technical review panel was Priscilla Tobias, Bureau Chief of IDOT’s Bureau of Safety Engineering. The other award-winning project was “Investigation of Contributing Factors Regarding Wrong-Way Driving on Freeways” (R27-090): Principal investigators were Hugo Zhou of Auburn University and Ryan Fries and Brent Vaughn of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Technical review panel chairs were Tobias and Richard Coakley, CH2M Hill.
  • Also at the THE annual conference, Geno Koehler, Policy and Safety Manager, IDOT Bureau of Operations, was named by ICT as its Technical Review Panel (TRP) Most Valuable Player. Koehler has served as TRP chair on two high-profile safety projects sponsored by IDOT: “Development of a Highway Incident Management Operational and Training Guide,” Phase 1 and Phase 2 (R27-064 and R27-118).