Dear friends,

With both respect and enthusiasm, I began my term as chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at UC Irvine on July 1, 2010. I owe a great deal to Distinguished Professor Masanobu Shinozuka, who served in this capacity for the previous nine years, as he steps down to continue as an active member of the faculty with more time to focus on research and instructional activities.

This summer, both our civil engineering and environmental engineering B.S. degrees were re-accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET, Inc.), through 2014, and this fall, our graduate programs were ranked by the National Research Council in the top 30 nationally, and among the best graduate programs on the UC Irvine campus. This is wonderful news that we can build on as we pursue our mission: "to educate students, at all levels, to be the best engineers and leaders in the nation and world by engaging them in a stimulating community dedicated to the discovery of knowledge, creation of new technologies, and service to society."

Read More >>

CEE NEWS IN REVIEW

 Brett Sanders Named New CEE Department Chair

The Henry Samueli School of Engineering named Brett F. Sanders, Ph.D., professor of civil and environmental engineering, the new chair of CEE, effective July 1. 

Sanders received a bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley (1993) and master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan (1994, 1997).  His expertise is in river engineering, coastal engineering and natural hazards, and he specializes in numerical modeling. Recently, his group has focused on high-resolution prediction of coastal and inland flood inundation. Since joining UC Irvine in 1997, he has served in a variety of roles at the department and school level. He has led the Environmental Engineering undergraduate and graduate programs, chaired the School's undergraduate affairs committee, has been a member of Graduate Council, led the ABET review of the CEE Department, and served on the steering committee of the School's Strategic Plan.  Sanders has consistently been recognized not only for his research, but also for his excellence in teaching, receiving numerous campus and school awards.

CEE Professor Promotions

Sunny Jiang, Ph.D., and Michael McNally, Ph.D., were promoted to full professors of civil and environmental engineering in July 2010. Jiang's research group focuses on microbial water quality, microbial ecology and environmental impact to human health. She is applying molecular biotechnology tools for assessment and detection of microbial pathogens in the aquatic environment. Jiang holds joint appointments with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Environmental Toxicology program in the School of Medicine. She is also a member of the Center for Virus Research.

McNally's research interests focus on the study of complex travel behavior, investigations of interrelationships between transportation and land use, and the development of new technologies and modeling methodologies which reflect and support these research areas. He is active in research and development relating to: activity-based travel forecasting models; web-based self-administered travel surveys; GPS-based, wireless in-vehicle data collection systems; the role of information on traveler behavior; multi-jurisdictional corridor decision support systems; and microsimulation models.

The Entertainer

Ragtime - that bright, toe-tapping piano music that flourished in bars, brothels and parlor rooms in the early 1900s - has found an unlikely promoter and practitioner at UC Irvine: a young civil engineering student named Jared DiBartolomeo.

DiBartolomeo belongs to a generation that worships technology, was raised on rap and is addicted to keyboards - the kind attached to computers and electronic toys. But sit him in front of a piano and, with the first infectious bars of Eubie Blake's "Charleston Rag," he can transport listeners back to the days before the phonograph.

Story: Kathryn Bold, University Communications
Photo: Steve Zylius, University Communications

Professor Stephen Ritchie Receives Frank M. Masters Transportation Engineering Award from ASCE
 
Stephen Ritchie, Ph.D., professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Irvine has been awarded the prominent Frank M. Masters Transportation Engineering Award for 2010 from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The award recognizes a member of the Society for the best example of innovative or noteworthy planning, design or construction of transportatio n facilities. Ritchie's award citation reads, "For his innovative work in the development and application of new technologies in transportation engineering," which was presented in October 2010 at the ASCE Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Ritchie studies transportation systems engineering, and is specifically interested in advanced traffic management and control systems, the development and application of emerging technologies in transportation engineering, and modeling greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions from transportation systems.

Assistant Professor Farzin Zareian and Undergraduate Student Honored by ESC

Assistant Professor Farzin Zareian, Ph.D. was one of five faculty members honored by The Henry Samueli School of Engineering's Engineering Student Council (ESC) at its annual Engineering Awards Banquet during the National Engineers Week celebration last February.  ESC also named civil and environmental engineering major Andrew Sidor as one of five undergraduate students of the year.

Nominations were made by engineering students, faculty and staff, and the winners were selected by the Engineering Presidents' Council of the ESC, which consists of the presidents of engineering student organizations on campus.

Masanobu Shinozuka, Ph.D., joined  a World Bank-coordinated study team (ImageCat/GEO-CAN team) to develop methods that allow rapid identification of seismic damage using  satellite, aerial and land-based remote sensing technology with a special focus on the disasters caused by two major earthquakes that occurred this year: a magnitude 7.0 quake in Haiti on Jan. 13; and a magnitude 8.8 quake in Chile on Feb. 27.

Shinozuka organized a mini-symposium session on the "Uncertainty in Bridge Damageability Modeling" at the Fifth International Conference on Bridge Maintenance, Safety and Management held in Philadelphia on July 11-15, 2010. Shinozuka's group presented four papers in this session, which were also published in the conference proceedings.

In June, Shinozuka celebrated his 80^th birthday with over 100 attendees, consisting of friends and former students, at Rhodes Island, Greece, in conjunction with the 6^th International Conference in Computational Stochastic Mechanics, in which seventy-five papers were presented.

Shinozuka also gave a keynote lecture at the 3^rd International Tsunami Field Symposium that took place on April 10-11, 2010 in Sendai, Japan. There were approximately forty papers presented at this symposium, most of which reported on tsunamis induced by the 2009 earthquakes in Chile.
 
________________________________________________________________________________________________
 

Ayman Mosallam, Ph.D., served as one of the four organizers for the 6^th International Engineering and Construction Conference under the sponsorship of the American Society of Civil  Engineers (ASCE Construction Institute), held on June 28-30, 2010 in Cairo, Egypt. Mosallam edited with three other co-editors the proceedings of the conference entitled the "Advances in Affordable Housing and Green Construction," which consists of more than 1,000 pages. The conference was celebrated as an international success covering all fields of green construction.

Professors Maria Feng and Masanobu Shinozuka were selected as members representing the U.S. in the Trilateral U.S., China and Japan research team formed in 2010 to develop a long-term monitoring system utilizing the most advanced technologies for the conservation of historical Mogao Caves in the Dunhuang and Longyou Grottoes near Shanghai in China. 

Hanoz Santoke Awarded 2010 ASEI Kalpana Chawla Scholarship

Hantoz Santoke, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in CEE, has been awarded the 2010 American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) Kalpana Chawla Scholarship.

Santoke, a California native, researches pharmaceutical compounds in the environment. These compounds have been detected in both surface and ground water in places ranging from the United States to Italy to India, due to incomplete metabolization of prescription medications in the human body or discharge from industrial facilities or homes.  Since conventional treatment processes are ineffective at removing these compounds from water, newer techniques known as advanced oxidation processes are being evaluated. 

Read More >>

CEE Graduate Student Receives Public Impact Distinguished Fellowship

Behrouz Shafei, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Masanobu Shinozuka, Ph.D., distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering, received the 2010-11 Public Impact Distinguished Fellowship from the UC Irvine Graduate Division. The Public Impact Fellowship highlights and supports doctoral students whose current research has the potential for substantial impact in the public sphere.  Shafei was one of only four UC Irvine graduate students to receive this prestigious $10,000 fellowship, which recognizes his outstanding academic achievement and contribution to improving the risk and vulnerability assessment of the nation's critical lifeline systems.

Five Undergraduate Students Awarded UROP Fellowships

Five undergraduate students in the laboratory of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor William Cooper, Ph.D., were appointed Fellows by the UC Irvine Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) Faculty Advisory Board for the 2009-10 academic year.

Grant Gontarski received $600 in support of his proposed research project, "Fate of Endorcrine System Disrupting Chemicals in the Environment."

Tova Handelman was awarded $500 in support of his proposed research project, "The Plastic Ocean: A survey of Marine Debris Found at Crystal Cove State Park and How Land-Based Plastics are Polluting the World's Oceans."
 
Christy A. Loo was awarded $600 in support of her proposed research project, "Method Development for the Investigation of Photochemial Reactivity of Dissolved Organic Matter and its Dependency on Oxygen," which will be supervised by both Cooper and Michael Gonsior, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the CEE Department.
 
Brian D. Nguyen and Francis Rodriguez together received $750 in support of their proposed research project, "Free Radical Degradation of Anti-Depressant Pharmaceuticals."

Stephen Esaki, who graduated with a B.S. degree in civil and environmental  engineering at UC Irvine and went on to get his M.S. degree at Stanford University, is currently in Tete, Mozambique, where he is volunteering with the Mennonite Central Committee designing and overseeing the construction of dams.
 

Dan Howes, Ph.D., who graduated from civil and environmental engineering with a Ph.D. degree in June, has been appointed as a senior irrigation engineer at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in the Irrigation Training and Research Center housed in the BioResource and Agricultural Engineering department. Howes teaches irrigation theory, drip irrigation, irrigation design, and water wells and pumps. His current interests include open channel flow measurement utilizing acoustic Doppler velocity meters, modeling crop evapotranspiration requirements, utilizing remote sensing and GIS to estimate actual crop evapotranspiration for large scale projects, and irrigation district modernization.

Debasis Karmakar, Ph.D, accepted a position as a structural engineer at M&H Energy Services in Houston, Texas. Karmakar served as a postdoctoral scholar under Professor Masanobu Shinozuka after receiving a Ph.D. degree on June 2009, also under Professor Shinozuka's guidance.