Warren Distinguished Lecture Series

Erica Fischer
Civil and Construction Engineering
Oregon State University

Recent fire activity and “mega-fires” resulted in record breaking fire events that have damaged civil infrastructure throughout wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities. These fires are causing massive impacts to civil infrastructure due to burning of homes. Erica Fischer summarizes a study that used machine learning algorithms to examine housing survivability in the 2021 Marshall Fire, investigating the role of housing, parcel, and neighborhood characteristics. The Marshall grass fire affected suburban communities and destroyed more than 1,000 houses. The identification of the most important parameters showed that the majority of the most impactful variables were not within the homeowner’s control. This conclusion demonstrates the importance of neighborhood and community characteristics that are controlled by the jurisdiction on housing survival, especially in a home rule state where building codes and planning may differ across jurisdictional boundaries.

The Sehlin Lecture
Kari Edison Watkins
Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of California at Davis 

ABSTRACT
Traffic crashes are the #1 cause of death from age 1 to 24. Forty-two percent 42% of adults in the US are obese and risk increases 6% with every additional hour spent commuting. Transportation accounts for 29% of total US Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The way we travel creates many societal problems, and yet our system has been designed the same way for generations. Decades of research has shown that how we use our physical roadway space is key to enabling active and shared public transportation to overcome these transportation issues. In this talk, Watkins discusses what drives people’s willingness to bike and to use transit and how we can design cities to improve safety, health, and sustainability.  

Otto Strack
Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering
University of Minnesota

The motivation for this work is the critical importance of efficient recovery of groundwater from all kinds of aquifers, including fractured rock, in today's environment of widespread water shortage. This presentation concerns flow of groundwater through fractured rock as in karst in Minnesota and Germany, and in granite in Sweden. Such flow is poorly understood; information from wells is difficult to interpret because we do not know from which fractures the sampled water is collected. An attractive alternative is to construct an accurate mathematical/numerical model capable of dealing with very large numbers of fractures of vastly different sizes. The advantage of a computer model is access to all data such as pressures and velocities. The idea of numerical tests is inspired by that pioneered by Peter Cundall and Otto Strack in the nineteen seventies for numerical testing of granular media on the scale of particles.

Julia R. Greer
Materials Science, Mechanics, and Medical Engineering
California Institute of Technology

Creation of reconfigurable and multi-functional materials can be achieved by incorporating architecture into material design. Greer and her team design and fabricate three-dimensional (3D) nano-architected materials that can exhibit superior and often tunable thermal, photonic, electrochemical, biochemical, and mechanical properties at extremely low mass densities (lighter than aerogels), which renders them useful and enabling in technological applications. Dominant properties of such meta-materials are driven by their multi-scale hierarchy: from characteristic material microstructure (atoms) to individual constituents (nanometers) to structural components (microns) to overall architectures (millimeters and above).

The Robert Dexter Memorial Lecture

Matthew Eatherton  
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech

 Matthew Eatherton discusses the critical role of a diaphragm in the lateral force resisting system. During the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, several parking garages collapsed due to diaphragm deficiencies. It was found that the US building codes severely underestimate the magnitude of lateral force that can occur in diaphragms during design earthquakes. Development has led to a new approach to diaphragm design, a significant shift in how researchers and engineers think about diaphragms. Eatherton provides an overview of the Steel Diaphragm Innovation Initiative (SDII) project, an introduction to seismic diaphragm design considering inelasticity, and some discussion of implications for the design of steel deck diaphragms. 

Manolis Veveakis 
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Duke University

Manolis Veveakis’s study addresses the modeling of deep-seated landslides using a combination of physics-based modeling, in-situ monitoring and material testing, remote sensing and data-driven approaches to constrain the physics governing the landslides, offer prediction and mitigation capabilities, and create hazard maps. In this talk, Veveakis provides a summary of over two decades of work assessing landslide hazards since the inception of the concept of frictional heating in landslides by Ioannis Vardoulakis in the early 2000s. 

Audrey Sawyer 
Earth Sciences, The Ohio State University

In agricultural areas with poorly drained soils, subsurface tile drains are commonly installed to improve drainage, but they also serve as transport pathways for excess nutrients to enter adjacent streams. Sawyer quantifies the transport of phosphorus (P) across interfaces—from soils to tile drains to streams, and through surface water, aquatic vegetation, and sediments. Her research team added a novel mixture of tracers to a farm field and sampled their breakthrough at the tile drain outlet to the stream. A small but sizable fraction of the added tracer arrived almost immediately at the tile drain outlet 30 meters away. Preliminary observations across additional sites suggest that woody buffers create the biophysical conditions needed to shade out aquatic vegetation, mitigate internal P concentrations in sediments, and increase oxygen concentrations in surface water. These insights can help manage dissolved P concentrations in agricultural streams in the Lake Erie Basin (USA and Canada) and other agricultural basins where rising P loads are exacerbating harmful algal blooms. 

CEGE graduate students compete to deliver the best thesis presentation in just 3 minutes. The winner will progress to the all-departments, College level competition and perhaps to the national competition. Tune in for a fast introduction to new research being conducted in CEGE!

A Special Warren Distinguished Lecture in memory of David Newcomb with 
Dave Timm
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Auburn University

This special lecture by Dave Timm is dedicated to the memory of Dr. David E. Newcomb. Timm received his BCE (1996), MS (1997), and Ph.D. (2001) degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota where he worked in Dr. Newcomb’s asphalt materials group as an undergraduate and graduate student. In this lecture, Timm focuses on the significant impact Newcomb had in Minnesota, across the US, and overseas through his research and teaching. Particular focus is placed on Newcomb's efforts to develop and implement mechanistic-empirical flexible pavement design, the lasting legacy of the Minnesota Road Research Project, long-life perpetual pavements, and efforts to improve asphalt pavement construction. 

Venkataraman Lakshmi
Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Virginia

Land surface hydrology is a collection of complex processes. The spatial variability the land surface properties (soil and vegetation) and the meteorological inputs (precipitation and radiation) play important roles in hydrology. Satellite remote sensing has a broad spatial and repeat temporal view of the land surface, and it is able to provide observations for use in hydrology, observations such as soil moisture, surface temperature, and vegetation density. The variability of the water cycle causes extremes such as droughts and floods, and these have an impact on society. Landslides and permafrost thaw are the two other hydrological extremes that impact society. In the past two decades quantification of the water cycle and its extremes has become possible with the advent of improved satellite sensors, modeling, and in-situ observations. These improved satellite sensors include microwave observations for soil moisture and precipitation; visible/near infrared for vegetation and evapotranspiration, gravity for groundwater/total water, and thermal observations for surface temperature. In this talk, Lakshmi focuses on using models, satellite, and in-situ observations for hydrological variability, specifically as they relate to hydrological extremes.