The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (SoCEE) is proud to recognize Surendra Bhatta and Aagya Dahal as recipients of support through the school’s Graduate Student Leadership Initiative.

This initiative is designed to recognize, motivate, inspire, and support graduate students who excel not only in their studies, but also in leadership and service to the graduate student population and their field of study. Through the program, the school provides fellowship support that can be used for conference participation, professional development opportunities, and other activities that help students grow as leaders.

By supporting graduate students in both academic and professional development, the initiative reflects SoCEE’s commitment to preparing future leaders in civil and environmental engineering. The recognition of Bhatta and Dahal highlights the strength of the school’s graduate community and the important role students play in advancing scholarship, leadership, and service.

SoCEE congratulates Surendra Bhatta and Aagya Dahal on this achievement and looks forward to their continued success and contributions to the field.

The School of Civil & Environmental Engineering (SoCEE) is proud to announce that Dr. Alexander Agrios and Dr. Sarira Motaref have been selected by the senior class to serve as the 2026 Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering Commencement Marshals.

This honor recognizes their exceptional dedication to students, contributions to engineering education, and commitment to mentorship. Both faculty members have made lasting impacts on the student experience through their teaching, advising, and engagement within the School.

As Commencement Marshals, Dr. Agrios and Dr. Motaref will play an integral role in leading the Class of 2026 during the graduation ceremony, reflecting their outstanding leadership and dedication to student success.

Congratulations to Dr. Alexander Agrios and Dr. Sarira Motaref on this well-earned recognition, and thank you for your continued contributions to the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering!

Click here for more details about 2026 commencement.

SoCEE is proud to celebrate outstanding achievements by its graduate students at the recent College of Engineering Graduate Poster Competition, where students from both Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering earned recognition at the departmental and college-wide levels.

In the first round of judging, Ana Carolina Vieira Rocha and Dahye Kim were selected as departmental winners for the Civil Engineering program, and Samuel Rothfarb was selected as the departmental winner for the Environmental Engineering program. In the final college-wide competition, Rothfarb earned first place overall, and Vieira Rocha earned third place overall, giving SoCEE two of the top three awards across all College of Engineering graduate programs.

The event highlighted the depth of graduate research taking place across UConn Engineering, while also recognizing students’ ability to clearly communicate complex ideas to a broad audience. For SoCEE, the results reflect excellence across multiple areas of research, from infrastructure durability to transportation optimization and autonomous scientific discovery.

Departmental and College-Wide Recognition

Because of the high number of participants and the strength of the presentations, two students were recognized in the Civil Engineering category during the first round of judging. Vieira Rocha and Kim were both named departmental winners, while Rothfarb advanced from the Environmental Engineering category and ultimately earned the competition’s top overall award. Vieira Rocha’s third-place finish in the final round further underscored the strong showing by SoCEE students in this year’s competition.

Photos from the event also capture the energy of the competition, including poster presentations, conversations among participants, and the award ceremony itself.

Samuel Rothfarb Earns First Place Overall

Rothfarb’s poster, “Autonomous Discovery of Energy Materials with Large Language Model Agents and First-Principles Simulation,” focused on the growing role of artificial intelligence in scientific discovery. His research introduces Materials Agents for Simulation and Theory in Electronic-structure Reasoning (MASTER), an active learning framework in which large language models autonomously design, execute, and interpret atomistic simulations.

Rather than simply automating routine tasks, the framework is designed to engage in higher-level scientific reasoning. Across two chemistry applications, the system significantly reduced the number of required atomistic simulations compared to conventional trial-and-error selection, helping accelerate materials discovery while also producing reasoning trajectories grounded in chemical principles. The work points toward a new model for autonomous scientific exploration.

Ana Carolina Vieira Rocha Earns Third Place Overall

Vieira Rocha’s poster, “Influence of Matrix Composition and Surface Treatments on Iron Sulfide-Induced Concrete Deterioration,” examined a major infrastructure challenge associated with pyrrhotite-bearing aggregates in concrete foundations. Her research explored how both the internal composition of concrete and external surface treatments affect the rate of oxidation-driven deterioration.

The study found that concrete matrix properties, including cement type and lower water-to-cement ratios, can help delay the onset of damage. It also showed that external protective treatments, especially polymer coatings, can slow deterioration and improve the long-term performance of affected concrete. Together, the findings support a combined strategy of material design optimization for new construction and protective interventions for existing foundations.

Vieira Rocha’s work contributes to ongoing research in this area at UConn. You can learn more through the Crumbling Concrete research website.

Dahye Kim Recognized as a Departmental Winner

Kim was recognized as one of the Civil Engineering departmental winners for her poster, “A Novel Constraint-Aware Quantum Algorithm for Transportation Routing Problems.” Her research focuses on transportation optimization using quantum algorithms, with particular attention to feasibility constraints that make routing problems especially difficult to solve.

In this work, Kim introduced a constraint-aware variant of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm, designed to preserve feasibility during quantum evolution. By comparing several formulations across small-scale transportation routing problems, the study demonstrated that embedding feasibility directly into the quantum process can improve performance in constrained optimization tasks. The research highlights the promise of quantum computing approaches for complex transportation and logistics problems.

Celebrating Research Excellence Across SoCEE

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering congratulates Ana Carolina Vieira Rocha, Dahye Kim, and Samuel Rothfarb on these outstanding accomplishments. Their success in the poster competition reflects the high quality of graduate research taking place across SoCEE, as well as the importance of communicating that research clearly and effectively.

Additional photos from the event are available through the UConn Engineering Flickr album.

Shah Saki, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Connecticut School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has received Second Prize for Oral Presentation in the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Energy and Renewable Energy Committee Student Award Competition.

Saki earned the award for his presentation titled “Projecting Power Outage Risk from Compound Heatwave–Storm Events in the ERCOT Region Under Future Climate Conditions.” The award recognizes outstanding student research presented at the AMS meeting and highlights work that advances understanding of weather and climate impacts on energy systems.

The student competition evaluates presentations across several criteria, including presentation clarity, scientific quality, and aesthetic quality. According to the AMS Energy and Renewable Energy Committees, Saki’s work stood out among student competitors for its strong scientific contribution and effective communication of complex climate risk analysis.

Saki conducts his doctoral research in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UConn, where he is also a Graduate Research Assistant at the Eversource Energy Center. His work focuses on understanding how extreme and compound weather events affect energy infrastructure and power system reliability, an increasingly important topic as climate change intensifies weather-related hazards.

His award-winning presentation examined how combined heatwaves and storm events may influence power outage risk in the ERCOT region, the electricity market that serves most of Texas. By projecting future climate conditions and analyzing compound event scenarios, the research helps identify potential vulnerabilities in energy systems and supports improved resilience planning.

Saki credited the mentorship and support of his research collaborators and advisors as instrumental in his work and presentation.

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) is the leading professional organization for atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrologic sciences. Its student awards recognize emerging researchers whose work demonstrates excellence in advancing scientific understanding and communicating research to the broader community.

The UConn CEE community congratulates Shah Saki on this recognition and looks forward to his continued contributions to research on climate, weather extremes, and energy system resilience.

Aagya Dahal, a Ph.D. student here in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been selected to receive a Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) Futures Fund Student Scholarship to attend Structures Congress 2026, which will be held in Boston from April 29 to May 1, 2026.

The scholarship provides complimentary student registration to the conference along with partial travel support, giving Dahal the opportunity to participate in one of the field’s leading professional gatherings and connect with structural engineers from across the country.

Dahal’s doctoral research focuses on the development of more sustainable ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC). Her work examines how supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) can be more effectively dispersed in polycarboxylate ether (PCE) based systems and evaluates their behavior through sedimentation testing, optical microscopy, and particle size analysis. She is also involved in a pyrrhotite-bearing concrete project, conducting detailed microstructural and phase analysis to better understand deterioration mechanisms in affected foundations.

In addition to her research, Dahal is a member of ASCE/SEI and recently joined the SE 2050 Commitment Program Committee, where she hopes to contribute to resources that support lower-carbon structural design.

“Being selected for the SEI Student Scholarship to attend Structures Congress 2026 is an incredible honor,” said Dahal. “It not only recognizes my efforts in sustainable UHPC research, but also gives me the opportunity to learn from and connect with leading structural engineers who are shaping the future of our profession.”

The award highlights both Dahal’s research contributions and her growing engagement with the structural engineering profession. By supporting student participation in Structures Congress, the scholarship helps emerging researchers and practitioners build connections, gain exposure to new ideas, and contribute to conversations shaping the future of the discipline.

Dahal is advised by School Director Kay Wille and conducts her research as part of UConn’s ongoing efforts to advance durable, innovative, and more sustainable construction materials.

As extreme weather events grow more frequent and intense, they increasingly occur in combination, creating compounding stresses on the nation’s power grid. New research from UConn’s Outage Prediction Modeling (OPM) team shows that these multi-hazard events influence both the frequency and duration of power outages across the United States.

Why Heat Alone Is Not the Full Story

Heat has long been recognized as a major stressor on power systems. However, the team’s analysis shows that its effects intensify when interacting with additional hazards such as high winds, intense precipitation, or severe storms.

Accessing outage information can be difficult because utilities often do not share detailed outage records openly. This analysis was made possible through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Eagle-I system and a partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, providing outage records from 2015 to 2022. Researchers paired those records with county-level weather data and National Weather Service alerts across the eight Independent System Operator regions in the contiguous United States. A condensed version of the findings is also available via PreventionWeb.

Using deep, unsupervised machine learning, the researchers developed self-organizing maps that cluster outages based on shared weather drivers. The automated clustering approach helps reveal patterns that can be overlooked when analyzing hazards in isolation, and supports clearer identification of the most frequent and most damaging combinations of events.

Regional Differences in Outage Risk

The findings demonstrate that outage dynamics differ significantly by region. In California, extreme heat is often compounded by high wind events and wildfire conditions. In Texas, heatwaves are frequently followed by intense rainfall. These combinations stretch grid systems beyond typical operating limits and increase outage likelihood.

Most outages were relatively short, but the study also documented rare, long-duration events. The median outage duration was approximately five hours, while the maximum outage duration reached 358 hours, nearly 14 days. One notable example was Hurricane Laura in August 2020, which was preceded by a multi-day heatwave and associated with prolonged service disruptions.

Implications for Energy Resilience

Rather than relying on one-size-fits-all national approaches, the study highlights the value of regionally tailored resilience planning, informed by local climate patterns and the hazard combinations most likely to strain the grid. The findings also reinforce the role of long-term investments in grid hardening as part of broader climate adaptation strategies.

Saki’s ongoing doctoral research continues to examine grid damage mechanisms and future climate scenarios to help inform forward-looking resilience planning.

Explore the research: Read the Study | Scientific Reports article | UConn Today story | PreventionWeb brief

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering is pleased to recognize Ryan Johns as the recipient of the CEE Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Fellowship for Fall 2025. This award is based on student feedback collected through course surveys and highlights exceptional dedication to teaching and student support.

Johns has made a strong impact on the classroom experience through his commitment to mentoring students, supporting their learning, and contributing to the school’s educational mission. His efforts were consistently recognized by undergraduate students, whose feedback played a central role in the fellowship selection process.

“Being a TA has been one of my favorite experiences throughout my time at UConn,” Johns shared. “Watching the students I’ve helped succeed in their coursework has been rewarding in itself. I could not be more grateful for this recognition and for the students and faculty who have supported me along the way.”

In addition to his teaching contributions, Johns conducts research focused on bridge repair methods using ultra high performance concrete (UHPC). He plans to present this work at the International Bridge Conference later this year, highlighting the connection between advanced research and classroom instruction.

The School also extends its appreciation to undergraduate students for completing TA surveys and providing thoughtful feedback, as well as to all graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants whose dedication supports student success across the program.