Warren Distinguished Lecture Series

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Sean Qian

Civil and Environmental Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University

With the availability of various data sources across all modes of transportation systems, it remains a challenge how to take advantage of those diverse spatio-temporal data to best understand travel patterns. In a mesoscopic network modeling framework, Qian formulates and solves for spatio-temporal passenger and vehicular flows in a multi-modal network explicitly considering solo-driving, bus, metro, parking, curb use and ride-sharing. The mesoscopic modeling approach can also be applied to real-time traffic operations, particularly early anomaly detection and proactive traffic management.

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Giuseppe Buscarnera

Civil Engineering
Northwestern University

Sand is the most ubiquitous class of natural granular solids and is an essential template to study this broad class of materials with unique features that render it adaptive to changes in pressure and density. It will be shown that suitable state variables can be introduced to explain and simulate the adaptivity of sand to external stress, thus opening new avenues for underground characterization, exploration of remote sites, infrastructure installation, and the design of new materials.

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
J. N. Reddy

Mechanical Engineering
Texas A&M University

This J.S. Braun/Braun Intertec Visiting Professor Lecture consists of Reddy’s recent research on (1) shell finite element with thickness stretches and free of all types of locking and (2) nonlocal approaches for modeling architected materials and structures and fracture in brittle and quasi-brittle solids including concrete and glass. 

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Nirupam Aich  

Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Aich presents his group’s research efforts on the PFAS treatment through the rational and safer design of novel carbon-metallic nanohybrids (single nano-entities which are a combination of at least two different nanomaterials), while determining how and to what extent the hybridization of nanomaterials alters their potential environmental and human health risk. Understanding the risk-benefit relationship will allow us to design safer multifunctional nanohybrids for water and PFAS treatment. Aich also discusses how we can leverage advanced manufacturing and membrane processes to design sustainable and scalable technologies for PFAS treatment. 

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Brice Lecampion 

Geo-Energy Lab
EPFL, Switzerland 

In this talk, Brice Lecampion explores the mechanics of fluid-driven frictional ruptures, accounting for frictional weakening, dilation, and permeability changes. While primarily occurring during hydraulic stimulation of geothermal reservoirs, these processes also impact fault stability, landslides, and glacier mechanics. Assuming a circular rupture geometry, Lecampion examines how the rupture propagation behavior can widely vary with rock properties, in-situ conditions, and injection protocols. Finally, he revisits the Basel-1 well stimulation, presenting a dilatant hydro-shearing model that replicates the injection sequence. He discusses the model's agreement with observed pressure and microseismic evolution, while addressing uncertainties in key parameters like horizontal stress and frictional properties.

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Bruno Sudret 

Risk, Safety and Uncertainty Quantification
ETH Zurich, Switzerland 

Stochastic simulators, whose outputs exhibit intrinsic variability even for fixed inputs, are increasingly used to model complex engineering systems, such as wind turbines or structures subjected to environmental loading in wind and earthquake engineering. Yet, structural reliability analysis in this setting remains largely underdeveloped, as classical methods fail to account for latent stochasticity and quickly become computationally prohibitive. In this talk, Sudret first revisits the formulation of reliability problems for stochastic simulators, highlighting the fundamental differences with deterministic settings and their implications for failure probability estimation. Sudret then introduces stochastic emulators, with a focus on stochastic polynomial chaos expansions (SPCE), which provide an efficient surrogate framework by explicitly separating parametric uncertainty from intrinsic model stochasticity. Building on this representation, Sudret proposes an active learning strategy tailored to stochastic systems.

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Jonathan Sprinkle 

Computer Science 
Vanderbilt University

This talk describes a vision for controlling a subset of vehicles in the flow of traffic in order to have a positive influence on the overall flow. Through a series of closed- and open-road experiments, various approaches are described to attempt to measure and control for road traffic that can be positively influenced by a small number of vehicles that drive differently. The talk will provide discussion of the I-24 MOTION measurement system in Nashville, as well as the technical and research hurdles.

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Kate Golden

A special presentation for Ethics Week.
NOTE: This session will not be recorded.

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Julian Fairey

An unidentified product of chloramine decomposition was first reported in 1981, and in 2024, my lab group in collaboration with researchers at USEPA and ETH-Zurich, revealed it as chloronitramide anion. To facilitate widespread occurrence studies, we more recently developed an ion chromatography method for chloronitramide anion quantitation and showed it was present in tap waters treated with chloramines at 22–314 μg/L. This talk focuses on chloramine decomposition chemistry and formation of reactive nitrogen species that serve as key intermediates in the formation pathways of chloronitramide anion and other nitrogenous disinfection byproducts.

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with CEGE Faculty