Archives: Monthly Archives: April 2025

Celebrating SoCEE’s Summer Doctoral Fellowship Recipients

A celebratory graphic with a blue background and white text that reads: Top Section (Header, centered and large): “CONGRATULATIONS!” Middle Section (Sub-header, light gray-blue box): “SoCEE’s 2025 Summer Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Awardees” Main Section (Photos and Names): Five circular headshots of award recipients are arranged in two rows. Each headshot is labeled with the recipient’s name and department in white text. Top row (left to right): Quinn Packer – Civil Engineering: Smiling person with glasses and shoulder-length brown hair in a suit and tie. Haimanti Bala – Civil Engineering: Person with long wavy dark hair and glasses, smiling in front of flowering trees. Israt Jahan – Environmental Engineering: Person with straight dark hair wearing a white top, softly smiling. Bottom row (left to right): 4. Oluwaseun Olufowobi – Civil Engineering: Person with braided hair styled in a bun, wearing a black collared top, looking directly at the camera. 5. Maxwell Wondolowski – Civil Engineering: Smiling person with a shaved head and beard, wearing a checkered shirt and tie, with a leafy background. Bottom Section: UConn’s logo appears at the bottom, reading: “UConn College of Engineering – School of Civil and Environmental Engineering” Hexagon graphics in gradient gray appear in the corners for visual design.

We’re thrilled to share that five outstanding Ph.D. students from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering have been awarded the UConn Summer Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. This competitive $2,000 fellowship is designed to support students as they work toward completing their dissertations.

Congratulations to:

  • Quinn Packer

  • Oluwaseun Olufowobi

  • Haimanti Bala

  • Maxwell Wondolowski

  • Israt Jahan

Each of these students is tackling pressing challenges in civil and environmental engineering, and this support will help them continue advancing their impactful research throughout the summer.

We’re proud of their accomplishments and excited to see what they achieve next!

Ph.D. Candidate Meshach Ojo Awarded Prestigious ACI Charles Pankow Foundation Fellowship

Image of a digital announcement graphic with a dark blue background and white text. The top section reads: "PhD Candidate Meshach Ojo Awarded ACI Charles Pankow Foundation Fellowship" Below this is a white box with black text that says: "Sponsored by the American Concrete Institute (ACI), this fellowship is awarded to one student annually, following a rigorous selection process that includes interviews with top candidates from across the nation." On the bottom right side of the white box is a headshot of Meshach Ojo, a young man with short hair, wearing a light green collared shirt and smiling. On the bottom left are two logos: The ACI (American Concrete Institute) logo with the tagline "Always advancing" in blue. The UConn College of Engineering logo, including "School of Civil and Environmental Engineering" underneath.

SoCEE is proud to announce that Meshach Ojo, a Ph.D. candidate in our program, has been selected as the recipient of the 2025–2026 Charles Pankow Foundation Fellowship, a distinguished award granted through the American Concrete Institute (ACI) Foundation. This national honor is reserved for students demonstrating exceptional potential to advance the field of concrete materials science and engineering.

The Charles Pankow Foundation Fellowship is among the most competitive awards offered by ACI. Following a rigorous selection process, including evaluation of research contributions and a formal interview round, only one student is chosen each year for this fellowship category. Meshach’s selection underscores both the quality of his research and his commitment to addressing critical real-world challenges in structural engineering.

As part of the fellowship, Meshach will receive a $10,000 educational stipend, mentorship from an industry leader, and sponsored attendance at two upcoming ACI Conventions—the Fall 2025 convention in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Spring 2026 convention in Chicago, Illinois. Additionally, he will be recognized in Concrete International magazine and featured on the ACI Foundation website for his contributions to the field.

Meshach’s research addresses a serious and ongoing issue affecting communities across the Northeastern United States and parts of Canada: crumbling concrete foundations caused by iron-sulfide-bearing aggregates, especially pyrrhotite. This phenomenon has compromised the structural integrity of thousands of homes, creating a widespread economic and safety crisis in regions such as Northeastern Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Quebec.

Check out this recent publication from the first phase of his research:

Driven by a passion to make a tangible difference in the lives of affected homeowners and communities, Meshach employs innovative electrochemical techniques to accelerate the deterioration of concrete in laboratory settings. This approach enables him to simulate the long-term effects of pyrrhotite-induced damage within a much shorter timeframe, offering valuable insights into how degradation occurs and progresses over time. By understanding these processes more deeply, Meshach’s work lays the foundation for evaluating and developing more effective mitigation strategies to combat this persistent issue.

Reflecting on the fellowship, Meshach offered this perspective:

“This award is a reminder of God’s grace and the power of perseverance. I am thankful for everyone who has supported me, and I hope this recognition encourages others to keep working faithfully toward the things that matter.”

Beyond his research achievements, Meshach’s humility, resilience, and dedication to his field exemplify the best of UConn’s commitment to engineering solutions for a better tomorrow. As the fellowship progresses, Meshach’s continued engagement with the ACI community will allow him to collaborate with leaders across the concrete industry, sharing knowledge and advancing innovations that directly impact infrastructure and public safety.

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering extends its congratulations to Meshach Ojo on this well-earned recognition. We look forward to following his journey and sharing more updates as his work continues to make a difference. Stay tuned for additional highlights, including Meshach’s upcoming feature in Concrete International magazine and the ACI Foundation website!

Click here to learn more about the fellowship: acifoundation.org

Ph.D. Student Olin Green Receives El Instituto Predoctoral Fellowship to Study Transportation Safety Inequity

Graphic with a dark blue background featuring the headline: “Ph.D. Student Olin Green Receives El Instituto Predoctoral Fellowship to Study Transportation Safety Inequity.” Below the headline is a white box containing the text: “Green’s research examines how geographic, socioeconomic, and environmental factors contribute to disparities in transportation safety.” On the right side of this white section is a portrait of Olin Green, a young man with short brown hair, wearing a purple and white checkered button-down shirt. At the bottom is the UConn College of Engineering logo, with the text “School of Civil and Environmental Engineering” underneath.

Olin Green, a doctoral candidate in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut, has been awarded the 2024–2025 El Instituto Predoctoral Fellowship with support from the Elizabeth Mahan Fund. This competitive award supports full-time pre-doctoral students conducting interdisciplinary research related to Latinx and Latin American communities.

Green’s project, The Hidden Dimensions of Road Safety: Exploring Socioeconomic and Built Environment Factors in Latin American and Minority Communities, examines how environmental and behavioral factors contribute to transportation safety disparities in underserved areas. His work addresses the disproportionate risks of injury and fatality faced by Latino and African American populations on U.S. roadways.

"Transportation safety inequity describes the unequal impact of traffic-related injuries and fatalities on certain populations, and this effect is especially evident in underserved areas where people are exposed a variety of different social, environmental, economic, and transportation-related disparities," Green explains.

To investigate these disparities, Green is analyzing naturalistic driving data from the SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS), in combination with census tract-level demographic and socioeconomic data. His analysis focuses on neighborhoods in Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties in Florida, selected for their diversity in infrastructure and population composition.

"My research focuses on the driver-related factors that contribute toward the disproportionate rates of injuries and fatalities in Latino and other minority communities," Green shared. "Specifically, I want to determine whether a driver’s behavior changes when traveling in different types of areas, or when traveling in areas with characteristics that are different than the driver’s place of residence."

The fellowship will support Green’s summer research and data analysis, with the goal of publishing findings in an academic journal and contributing a UConn Today article later this year. Although the study is based in Florida, its implications are far-reaching—including for cities like Hartford, Connecticut, where more than 40% of residents identify as Latino.

Green is advised by Professors Davis Chacon-Hurtado and John Ivan and recently received additional research support from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Diego Cerrai Receives NSF CAREER Award for Power Outage and Restoration Modeling

A winter scene shows a group of five people standing outside on a snow-covered field, observing or working with scientific weather equipment. The group is dressed in winter clothing, including coats and hats. One person is pointing toward a piece of equipment in the center of the image. To the right, a large white trailer with the NASA logo and other research decals is parked on the snow. Several tall weather instruments and sensors are installed around the area, and leafless trees form a wooded backdrop under a cloudy sky. A residential house is visible in the distance on the left side of the image.Dr. Diego Cerrai, a civil and environmental engineering professor, stands smiling in front of a large piece of scientific equipment mounted on a trailer. The equipment appears to be a radar or weather sensor with a white, angular dish pointed upward. The background shows a partly cloudy sky and an open landscape with grassy fields and trees.

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering proudly announces that Dr. Diego Cerrai, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Interim Director of the Eversource Energy Center (EEC), has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in support of his research into storm impact modeling and infrastructure resilience.

Cerrai’s work focuses on understanding snow and ice accretion on power infrastructure, which is a key contributor to outages during winter storms. His team has been collaborating with NASA for the past four years, collecting detailed data on falling snow, including its density and the number of particles in a given volume. These observations are essential for refining weather models and building more accurate outage prediction tools.

“The first step is to fix those inconsistencies and biases and make sure that the quantities that the weather model predict match the observation we collect,” Cerrai explains.

The UConn Outage Prediction Model (OPM), already in use by Eversource Energy, Dominion Energy, Avangrid, and Exelon, helps utility companies plan ahead of severe weather. With support from the NSF CAREER Award, Cerrai will improve the model’s accuracy and expand its application to more regions.

Cerrai is also developing a restoration model to estimate how long power outages will last. This model factors in snow density, outage forecasts, and utility company priorities while addressing one major oversight in current restoration tools: road conditions.

“Right now, we use the speed limit to predict how fast the crews move,” Cerrai says. “But in winter, you can have blocked roads and snow on the roads. So, for accurate forecasts, it is absolutely necessary to model the road conditions.”

A long-term goal of this work is to reduce disparities in restoration timelines between rural and urban communities by rethinking how restoration is prioritized.

In addition to the technical advancements, the grant also supports a training course for utility decision-makers and emergency response planners, ensuring they have access to, and know how to apply, the most up-to-date modeling tools.

Cerrai’s NSF CAREER project was recently highlighted by NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) outreach team, which is using the story to help inspire future scientists to explore precipitation research. Cerrai is also sharing the news with the National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) network, where he is a 2022 alum.

Read Dr. Cerrai’s welcome message as EEC interim director.

UConn EERI Student Chapter to Host Industry Expert Dr. Erik Bishop

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering is excited to announce that the UConn chapter of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) has been selected to participate in the 2024–2025 Friedman Family Visiting Professionals Program. This prestigious national program brings top professionals in earthquake engineering to university campuses to share expertise, promote career exploration, and engage students in cutting-edge topics in seismic safety and design.

As part of this series, Dr. Erik Bishop, Associate Principal at Reid Middleton, Inc. in Everett, WA, will visit UConn to deliver a special lecture:

Date: Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM
Location: GW-001 (Ground Floor Lecture Hall)
Title: Lessons Learned from Earthquake Reconnaissance following Earthquakes in California (2019), Mexico City (2017), Japan (2011), Chile (2010), and China (2008)

Open to all students, faculty, and staff. Refreshments will be served!

Dr. Bishop brings extensive field and design experience from around the globe. His work includes seismic evaluation and rehabilitation, lifeline utility resiliency, and the development of innovative earthquake response tools. Having participated in post-earthquake reconnaissance missions across five countries, he offers a global perspective on structural performance and recovery. Dr. Bishop was named a Housner Fellow by EERI in 2017 in recognition of his leadership in earthquake engineering.

We look forward to welcoming Dr. Bishop and launching this exciting Visiting Professionals series at UConn. We encourage all members of the engineering community to attend and learn from this outstanding expert in the field.

To learn more about the Friedman Family Visiting Professionals Program, visit eeri.org.

SoCEE Student Selected for NSF NHERI REU Program

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering is proud to share that Priya Whitley, an undergraduate student majoring in civil engineering at the University of Connecticut, has been selected to participate in the highly competitive 2025 NSF NHERI Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Summer Program.

Priya’s selection was made possible in part by a nomination from Dr. Manish Roy, faculty member here at SoCEE, who supported her application and provided a letter of recommendation for the program. His mentorship and encouragement played an important role in helping Priya secure this nationally competitive opportunity.

This summer, Priya will join a select cohort of students from across the country to conduct cutting-edge research at the University of Florida’s Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Experimental Facility (BLWT)—one of the most advanced laboratories in the United States for studying the effects of extreme wind events on civil infrastructure. She is 1 of just 41 students chosen for the NHERI SURF-REU cohort, which spans six REU sites nationwide and runs from June 2 through August 5, 2025.

At the UF NHERI Experimental Facility, Priya will contribute to ongoing research projects focused on improving our understanding of how structures respond to wind-related hazards such as hurricanes and tornadoes. The facility supports transformative research in wind engineering by:

  • Reducing uncertainties in the wind loading chain,

  • Advancing physical and computational modeling of complex wind flow fields,

  • Enabling automation in structural testing and performance monitoring, and

  • Promoting the design of more resilient, hazard-resistant infrastructure.

This experience will provide Priya with hands-on training in experimental research methods, data analysis, and collaborative problem-solving in a team-based research environment. Her work will culminate in a formal research presentation at the NSF NHERI REU Research Symposium, held August 6–8, 2025, at Oregon State University, where she will share her findings alongside peers and leading researchers in the field.

Priya is also actively engaged in outreach through the Vergano Institute for Inclusion, where she serves as a Science Bowl Coordinator. She is passionate about combining technical innovation with inclusive practices in engineering education and research.

We congratulate Priya on this outstanding achievement and thank Dr. Roy for his continued mentorship and advocacy for student success. We look forward to the impact Priya will make through this unique research opportunity.

Click here to learn more about the NHERI Wind Research Facility.