New schedule released for the Kent Seminar Series

Illinois Center for Transportation has recently launched another season of the Kent Seminar Series. The series kicked off with a mandatory lab safety training session moderated by ICT research engineers. Students new to ATREL learned about general safety rules, lab use best practices, chemical safety, and several other topics. The following Kent Series presentation, “The Past, Present, and Future of Airfields and Pavements Research at the U.S. Army ERDC” was given by Timothy Rushing, Chief of the airfields and Pavements Branch of the Geotechncial and Structures Lab, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center. Cheelan Bo-Linn, Senior Specialist in Education at UIUC’s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) also presented on active teaching and learning strategies within a highly interactive seminar that focused on management of the amount of content that we should teach while providing opportunities for students to be engaged in active learning and on Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATS), which actively engage students while providing valuable feedback about their learning.

Doctoral students’ contributions to this year’s program included talks given by Quang Tran on the rapid detection of concrete joint activation from normalized shear wave transmission energy, Laura Ghosh on construction and rehabilitation decision-making considering traffic-related energy consumption, Priyanka Sarker on analyses and prediction of granular layer rutting trends in FAA’s NAPTF Construction Cycle 5 pavement test sections, and Mohammad Nabian on deep learning for accelerated reliability analysis of infrastructure networks.

All lectures are streamlined live on YouTube, allowing for real-time, interactive participation in discussions for attendees joining the lectures remotely. Please join us every Thursday at 12:30 p.m. (SCT) during the Fall semester via this link, and view any seminars you may have missed in our archive.