Warren Distinguished Lecture Series
The Warren Distinguished Lecture Series was made possible through a generous, renewing gift from Alice Warren Gaarden. CEGE is continually thankful for her generosity, which allows us to bring in researchers and practitioners to share their knowledge with students, faculty, and friends of CEGE. A lecture is held most Fridays at 10:10 a.m. in the George J. Schroepfer Conference Theatre (room 210) in the Civil Engineering Building. If you cannot join us in person, please join us online.
The Warren Distinguished Lecture Series will be on hiatus over the summer. Look forward to more deep discussions starting in September.
Find our archive on YouTube @umnCEGE
Upcoming Events
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Past Events
Life and Death of Drops, Particles, and Films and Their Applications
Friday, May 2, 2025, 10:10 a.m.
A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Min Y. Pack
Mechanical Engineering, Baylor University
Many natural and commercial processes rely on droplet/film dynamics. These include the aeration of waterways, agrochemical retention (or any other spray cooling or deposition technologies), among many others. Min Pack seeks to understand how the formation and termination of drops and films are relevant for various sustainability-related issues for future studies. Future “precision agriculture” techniques, for example, requires knowledge of how the rheology is modified by various adjuvants in agrochemicals (and excipients in pharmaceuticals). Although a great deal of effort is spent on optimizing the chemical formulations, a surprisingly large percentage of agrochemicals do not end up on the target surfaces and lead to pollution through contaminated runoff and spray drift. There are many examples for both droplet and thin film dynamics. Pack hopes to suggest a few outstanding research questions that may be of worth pondering for future work.
Tall Wood Buildings for Future Cities
Friday, April 25, 2025, 10:10 a.m.
A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Shiling Pei
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Colorado School of Mines
Wood has thousands of years of history as a building material, but it has also been restricted by building codes and regulations following the industrial revolution. Wood building is viewed as a cost-effective but less-engineered system, mainly for low-rise options. Mass timber construction is a relatively new way of utilizing wood material for modern, high performance buildings at both large and small scales. It gives rise to the currently trending conception of wooden sky-scrapers. Pei provided an overview of recent advancements in mass timber construction and highlights the benefit of tall wood option in an urban development context. Specially, he introduces recent research efforts aiming at developing a seismically resilient tall wood building architype, including results from the NHERI TallWood project featuring the world’s tallest full-scale building ever tested on a shake table to date.
Bioelastic State Recovery for Haptic Sensory Substitution
Friday, April 18, 2025, 2:30 p.m.
In-person only event; no recording available
Special Lecture with
Yonggang Huang
Northwestern University
The rich set of mechanoreceptors found in human skin offers a versatile engineering interface for transmitting information and eliciting perceptions, potentially serving a broad range of applications in patient care and other important industries. Targeted multisensory engagement of these afferent units, however, faces persistent challenges, especially for wearable, programmable systems that need to operate adaptively across the body. Here Huang presents a miniaturized electromechanical structure that, when combined with skin as an elastic, energy-storing element, supports bistable, self-sensing modes of deformation. Targeting specific classes of mechanoreceptors as the basis for distinct, programmed sensory responses, this haptic unit can deliver both dynamic and static stimuli, directed as either normal or shear forces. Systematic experimental and theoretical studies establish foundational principles and practical criteria for low-energy operation across natural anatomical variations in the mechanical properties of human skin. A wireless, skin-conformable haptic interface, integrating an array of these bistable transducers, serves as a high-density channel capable of rendering input from smartphone-based 3D scanning and inertial sensors. Demonstrations of this system include sensory substitution designed to improve the quality of life for patients with visual and proprioceptive impairments.
Adaptive Finite Element Methods and Machine-learning-based Surrogates for the Phase Field Fracture Model
Friday, April 18, 2025, 10:10 a.m.
A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Ravindra Duddu
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
Modeling and understanding fracture propagation is necessary to improve the safety and reliability of civil and aerospace structures and to design better materials and structures with enhanced fracture resistance. Over the last decade, the phase field models of fracture emerged as robust computational approaches, owing to their ability to simulate complex crack morphologies, including splitting and merging. However, the main challenge with applying the phase field fracture model to real case scenarios is the computational cost associated with resolving the diffuse crack interface. Adaptive finite element methods and machine-learning-based model surrogates offer the potential to enable accurate and efficient simulations. In this talk, Duddu gives an overview of his research work conducted in the past few years.
Designing Catalysts and Reactive Separations for Electrochemical Wastewater Refining
Thursday, April 17, 2025, 1:25 p.m.
CEMS-CEGE seminar
In-person only event; no recording available
Special Lecture with
William Tarpeh
Chemical Engineering, Stanford University
Over the past century, humans have altered the global nitrogen cycle so drastically that managing nitrogen has emerged as a grand engineering challenge and urgent need. The emissions-intensive Haber-Bosch process for industrial fertilizer production, which converts nitrogen gas into ammonia, outpaces wastewater nitrogen removal due to fertilizer runoff and 80% of wastewater being discharged without treatment. Refining nitrate and ammonia into valuable products through reactive separations, which integrate catalysis and separations, is a useful approach for addressing both water pollution and chemical manufacturing. For example, selective membranes and adsorbents can be leveraged to control catalytic performance by tuning microenvironments near catalyst active sites. Tarpeh will focus on recent work understanding catalytic and mass transport mechanisms, designing nitrogen-selective processes and materials, and systematically probing and valorizing real wastewaters.
Perception and Sensing in the Context of Partially and Fully Autonomous Civil Systems
Friday, April 11, 2025, 10:10 a.m.
A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Christian Claudel
Transportation Engineering, University of Texas at Austin
In this talk, Christian Claudel discusses the development and testing of two autonomous and partially autonomous systems at the University of Texas. The first system is a traffic collision avoidance system for ground traffic using Augmented Reality (AR) devices in passthrough mode. He discusses the design of the system and some early results, with future potential. The second system is an autonomous rover that detects and classifies microplastics on beaches using near Infrared spectroscopy. He similarly discusses the iterative design of this system and future potential developments.
Translating Molecular Science to Practical Application
Friday, April 4, 2025, 10:10 a.m.
A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Lynn Katz
Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering
University of Texas at Austin
Environmental contamination from anthropogenic activities is often defined by the presence of either legacy or emerging contaminants. Superfund sites associated with legacy contaminants were the focus of environmental remediation activities in the twentieth century. Now, "emerging contaminants" have captured the focus of the environmental community. However the distinction between legacy and emerging contaminants is often blurred, especially for metals and metalloids, because once these species enter the environment, they cannot be destroyed and often re-emerge. The unique properties of elements such as Pb, Hg, Ra, Cd, Zn, Cr, As, Se, B, Li and rare earth elements make them valuable economic resources; demand is growing rapidly and will continue to grow throughout the world. Their toxicity, fate and transport depend on their concentration and speciation. In this seminar, Katz explores several examples in which molecular level insights from spectroscopic and/or computational studies have been used to guide modeling of metal ion sorption in water treatment processes, predict ion-pairing in membrane systems, and describe metal(oid) processes in contaminated sediments in mining impacted lakes. Through these examples, Katz demonstrates how increased understanding at the molecular level can guide contaminant remediation and treatment options.
Computational Innovations in Wind Engineering: A Path to Urban Resilience
Friday, March 28, 2025, 10:10 a.m.
A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Seymour M.J. Spence
Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan
Advances in computational modeling are transforming the abilities of engineers to analyze complex infrastructure systems exposed to natural hazards. This presentation begins by highlighting the significant progress in wind engineering over the past decade, detailing the methods that have enabled the capture of the interdependent and multi-hazard nature of wind damage to building systems, and translating these effects into losses and consequences. Spence then explores the role of artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning of latent spaces, in significantly accelerating the evaluation of complex nonlinear systems influenced by stochastic models representing extreme natural hazards. In the final part of the talk, Spence shifts focus to how breakthroughs in high-fidelity modeling of individual infrastructure components can be integrated through distributed computing to model intricate and diverse systems with unparalleled detail. With an emphasis on the impact of hurricanes on coastal communities, the discussion will illustrate how these advancements can be harnessed to provide essential engineering and non-engineering knowledge necessary for developing cities that are resilient and adaptive to extreme natural hazards.
Learning about Snow-derived Water Resources through Remote Sensing and Data Assimilation
Friday, March 21, 2025, 10:10 a.m.
A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Steve Margulis
Civil and Environmental Engineering, UCLA
Global mountain snowpacks serve as a vital seasonal water reservoir. Snowmelt-driven runoff sustains many downstream ecosystems, including human civilization and its agriculture in many areas of the globe. Despite its importance, characterizing the amount of water stored in snowpacks, that is, the snow water equivalent (SWE), and how it varies over space and time in global mountains has largely eluded hydrologists. Margulis covers a survey of work in our group over the last 15-20 years aimed at contributing to the characterization of global mountain snow. A unifying theme of the work is the use of data assimilation to tie together remote sensing observations and hydrologic models in an effort to estimate SWE. The journey starts with knowing almost nothing about snow to most recently leading the development of a proposed NASA snow mission. The talk will span across the electromagnetic spectrum from microwave to visible wavelengths and highlight some ideas that worked well and others that did not. The talk will end on where we currently stand in characterizing mountain SWE and the pathways and opportunities for moving forward.
Developing a Reliable and Resilient Freeway Network
Friday, March 7, 2025, 10:10 a.m.
A Distinguished Warren Lecture with
Eli Kwon
Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota Duluth
The ultimate challenge facing transportation engineers is developing and maintaining a reliable and resilient freeway network, which can absorb and adapt to various traffic disturbances and recover from congestion with maximum efficiency. The key elements in developing such a resilient freeway network include: 1) the capability to monitor and assess the performance of traffic flows under different operating conditions at a corridor level, 2) a set of the traffic-management strategies that can optimize the corridor-wide traffic performance under time-variant geometric/operational environment, and 3) the corridor-wide geometry structure that can maximize the operational resilience of a given corridor- traffic system in dealing with both normal and abnormal traffic patterns. To address the above issues, several research projects have been conducted at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) in cooperation with the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT). In this seminar, Eli Kwon presents the results from some of those projects.