Archives: Monthly Archives: January 2020
CEE INCLUDE Team Kicks Off $2M NSF Grant
Department Head Dr. Maria Chrysochoou delivers a talk at the 2019 RED Consortium Meeting.
Four members of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering traveled to Alexandria, VA in November, 2019 to kick off a new department-level initiative focusing on neurodiversity. The initiative is funded through a $2M grant from the National Science Foundation's Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program. The project, titled "Beyond Accommodation: Leveraging Neurodiversity for Engineering Innovation," aims to make curricular and cultural changes within the department over the course of five years.
Professor and Department Head Maria Chrysochoou delivered a lightning talk at the event highlighting key features of the program. The project, she says, is aimed at improving the educational experience and learning outcomes for neurodiverse students, changing the way courses are delivered, and building an ecosystem on campus that supports neurodiverse students throughout their college years. The team believes that the project may increase the diversity, and ultimately, the creativity of the engineering workforce.
Dr. Chrysochoou, the Principal Investigator and team leader, was joined at the Consortium Meeting by co-investigators Professor Amvrossios Bagtzoglou and Associate Professor Arash Zaghi, and Project Manager Connie Syharat.
Artist Julia Reich provides visual note-taking during a talk by Dr. Arash Zaghi.
Dr. Ramesh Malla’s Space Structures Research Featured in ASCE’s Civil Engineering Magazine
The research of Dr. Ramesh Malla has been featured in the January 2020 issue of ASCE’s Civil Engineering Magazine. Dr. Malla is leading UConn’s multidisciplinary team of researchers as part of the Resilient Extra Terrestrial Habitats institute (RETHi), a project led by Purdue University and in conjunction with researchers at Harvard University and the University of Texas at San Antonio. The full article is available on the ASCE website. Or, you can download the PDF and read the full article here.
Autonomous Vehicle Testing Facility May Come to Storrs
Associate Research Professor and Executive Director of the Connecticut Transportation Institute (CTI), Eric Jackson, hopes to bring autonomous vehicle testing to Storrs. Read more about the proposed facility in the Hartford Business Journal.
WiSFiRE Women in STEM Expo – January 31, 2020
Get ready to be inspired by CEE’s women in STEM!
Register for WisFire at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wisfire-women-in-stem-frontiers-in-research-expo-registration-86460077419
Novel UHPC Bridge Repair Method Highlighted in Civil Engineering Magazine
The work of Dr. Arash Zaghi and his research team, including Dr. Alexandra Hain, has been featured in the December 2019 issue of ASCE’s Civil Engineering Magazine. The article highlights the team’s implementation of a novel method using ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) to repair a corroded steel girder bridge in the state of Connecticut.
The implementation phase of the project follows six years of extensive research conducted in conjunction with the Connecticut Department of Transportation (ConnDOT). Following the repair, data will be collected from the site to evaluate the performance of the bridge girder and to further improve the team’s analytic models.
Download the PDF and read the full article here.
