Infrastructure

Two civil engineering faculty members have been named to key positions on committees of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences. Mark Abkowitz, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, has been appointed chair of the… Read More

Hiba Baroud has received a 2020 NSF Faculty Early CAREER Development grant to boost community resilience and sustainability through a three-pronged project that starts with a better understanding of how people and infrastructures interact during hazards. The five-year, $500,000 grant, “Policy-Infrastructure-Community Interdependencies: The Next Frontiers in Dynamic Networks,” begins July… Read More

Design Day 2019 took students and visitors to Mars, a diving depth of 300 feet and a potential green oasis above a stretch of Interstate 65. Dean Phillipe Fauchet (left) and Assistant Dean of Design Tom Withrow commend students, advisers, faculty and sponsors for two semesters of hard work. Other… Read More

Hiba Baroud has been selected to the first cohort of the Chancellor’s Public Voices Fellowship, a semester-long program designed to expand Vanderbilt’s global reach by amplifying the impact of faculty academic research. Starting July 1, these three fellows will work with the Division of Communications to develop a highly tailored communications and promotion… Read More

A massive, multi-billion dollar project to connect Hong Kong, Zhuhai, and Macau has been troubled by substandard concrete, cost overruns and design issues, including concrete blocks that drifted away from the artificial islands they are designed to protect. Concrete is a vital part of Hong Kong’s economy. A Vanderbilt civil… Read More

Written by Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Caglar Oskay & Post-Doctoral Research Scholar Alessandro Fascetti. This article was originally posted on the VUBreakThru blog. A 2016 Trans-Institutional Program (TIPs) award, the Vanderbilt Initiative for Intelligent Resilient Infrastructure Systems (IRIS) continues to make progress. The development of the… Read More

A new master’s degree from Vanderbilt University School of Engineering will prepare students to meet increasing workforce needs in risk, reliability and resilience engineering. The Risk, Reliability, and Resilience (RRR) Engineering professional master’s degree program is expected to be of great interest. Companies have been asking whether the School of… Read More

Lock & Dam 25, near Winfield, Missouri on the Upper Mississippi River, was built in 1939 Unscheduled lock closures create costly ripple effects across the shipper supply chain – adding more than $1 billion in additional transportation expenses annually and disrupting state economies along U.S. inland waterways. Those are the… Read More

Build and use microscope systems that do not exist commercially to unlock deeper insights in biomedicine. Design and develop a space-based platform to study Earth’s evolving ecology from an elevated vantage point. Create a research hub for development and testing of durable, sustainable infrastructure materials. All big ideas with widespread… Read More

In a world with more frequent extreme weather events, basing new bridges on historical weather data and previous structure wear no longer works. Take South Carolina, said Hiba Baroud, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. Four tropical storms plus Hurricane Matthew pounded the coastal state in 2016 alone, the latter… Read More