Student Awards 2018-2019

PhD student Ahmed Abdelhady selected for Rackham International Student Fellowship

PhD student, Ahmed Abdelhady, was selected by the Rackham Graduate School to receive the Rackham International Student Fellowship based on his strong academic record, making good progress towards his degree, and his outstanding academic and professional promise. Abdelhady’s research is on developing a versatile software that can evaluate community resilience for communities subjected to extreme wind hazards.

CEE undergraduate students receive Distinguished Achievement Undergraduate Award

CEE undergraduate students Adam Assink and Joseph Rodgers have received the Distinguished Achievement Undergraduate Award from Michigan Engineering. The award is rewarded based on academic achievement, exemplary character, leadership in class and activities, and potential for success in future endeavors.

PhD Student Cassandra Champagne Receives EREF Scholarship Award

PhD student Cassandra Champagne was selected by the Environmental Research and Education Foundation (EREF) to receive the Fiessinger Doctoral Scholarship to support her research on improving the quality and efficiency of landfill monitoring using autonomous robotics technology. The scholarship recognizes one doctoral student each year working at the forefront of the waste management and engineering field.

Two CEE PhD students receive Dow Sustainability Fellowships

PhD students Cassandra Champagne and Morteza Taiebat were named Dow Sustainability Doctoral Fellows. Dow Fellows focus on interdisciplinary approaches to a broad array of sustainability challenges related to water, energy, transportation, built environment, climate change, food, health, human behavior, and others.

PhD Student Sehwan Chung Selected for MICDE Fellowship

PhD student Sehwan Chung was selected by the University of Michigan to receive a Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery & Engineering (MICDE) Fellowship to support his research on wearable-based human-robot collaboration in construction sites. Chung’s research focuses on wearable-based human-robot collaboration in construction sites.

PhD Student Katherine Dowdell Selected for NWRI-Biolargo Graduate Fellowship

PhD student Katherine Dowdell was selected by the National Water Research Institute (NWRI) to receive an NWRI-Biolargo Graduate Fellowship to support her research project on optimizing filter backwashing practices to reduce pathogens in drinking water. The NWRI-BioLargo Fellowship research must pertain to developing and/or enhancing water supplies.

PhD student Katherine Dowdell receives IIE scholarship

PhD student Katherine Dowdell was selected by the Institute of International Education (IIE) to receive the 2019 IIE-GIRE Graduate International Research Experience (IIE-GIRE) Program scholarship. The scholarship recognizes graduate students who are interested in international research. Dowdell will be working at Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) where he project will focus on the influence of drinking water ozonation and biological filtration on opportunistic bacterial pathogens.

Five predoctoral CEE students receive Rackham Predoctoral Fellowships

Predoctoral CEE students, Sampurna Datta, Da Li, Nicole Rockey, Shilva Shrestha and Zhengtian Xu, have received Rackham Predoctoral Fellowships from the Rackham Graduate School. The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship supports outstanding doctoral students who have achieved candidacy and are actively working on dissertation research and writing. The program seeks to support students working on dissertations that are unusually creative, ambitious and impactful.

PhD Student Houtan Jebelli Awarded the Charles M. Eastman Top PhD Paper Award

PhD student Houtan Jebelli was awarded by the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building Construction (CIB) with the Charles M. Eastman Top PhD Paper Award for his paper “Mobile EEG-based Workers’ Stress Recognition by Applying Deep Neural Network.” This award served as the best paper award for the CIB W78 Conference on IT in Design, Construction, and Management.

PhD student Anne Menefee selected for Department of Energy fellowship

PhD student Anne Menefee was selected by the Department of Energy (DOE) to receive an Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Fellowship to support her research on mitigating human-driven climate change through engineered carbon management. Through this fellowship, she will examine how mineral reactivity at critical contact points along fractures impacts permeability and fluid transport. Menefee is interested in systems where dissolution of fracture contact points may be coupled with volume-expanding precipitation reactions and looking at how those competing mechanisms impact overall fracture permeability.

CEE student receives ASCE scholarship award

CEE undergraduate student Kelly Ni was selected by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Southeast Michigan Branch Committee on Younger Members to receive a student scholarship award to support her higher education. This award is presented to students who have demonstrated an interest in ASCE and the advancement of the civil engineering profession.

Master’s student Freddy Ordonez receives two scholarship awards

Master’s student Freddy Ordonez was been selected by the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF) to receive a scholarship that supports and empowers people of Hispanic or Latino heritage in higher education. Ordonez also received the Chevron Scholarship from Great Minds in Stem (GMiS) which is aimed to increase the graduation rate among underrepresented and underserved STEM students. Ordonez research focused on a novel anaerobic membrane bioreactor technology that aims to maximize biofilm growth to treat domestic wastewater at extremely low temperatures.

PhD students receive ITiMS Fellowships

CEE PhD students, Shilva Shrestha and Kathryn Langenfeld, received the Integrated Training in Microbial Systems (ITiMS) Fellowship through the School of Public Health. Langenfeld’s research focuses on the role of phages in the dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes to the environment from wastewater treatment plants. Shrestha’s research focuses on recovering high-value chemicals from organic waste, particularly brewery waste.

PhD student Arthriya Suksuwan selected as Barbour Scholar

PhD student Arthriya Suksuwan was selected by the Dean and Executive Board of the Rackham Graduate School and the Barbour Advisory Committee to receive the Barbour Scholarship for the 2019-2020 academic year. The scholarship is awarded based on highest academic and professional caliber from the countries extending from Turkey to Japan and the Philippines to study modern science, medicine, mathematics, and other academic disciplines and professions critical to the development of their native lands. Suksuwan’s research focuses on establishing benchmark approaches for designing wind sensitive structures that optimize economical/environmental criteria while rationally meeting society’s need for a truly safe built environment

CEE PhD student Arthriya Suksuwan receives CERRA Student Recognition Award

Arthriya Suksuwan has been selected as a recipient of the 2019 International Civil Engineering Risk and Reliability Association (CERRA) Student Recognition Award. Arthriya was recognized for two papers, co-written with Dr. Seymour Spence.

CEE students receive awards at the Engineering Graduate Symposium

CEE graduate students Xiaotong Sun and Da Li received awards from the College of Engineering at the Engineering College Symposium on October 26th, 2018. Sun received the Engineering Innovation Award, which recognizes a graduate student who has demonstrated research with outstanding engineering innovation in the Advanced Graduate Student Research Poster Session. Li received the Communication Award, which recognizes a graduate student who has demonstrated excellence in scientific communication in the Advanced Graduate Student Research Poster Session.

University of Michigan student team wins National Transportation Technology Tournament

A University of Michigan student team won the second annual Transportation Technology Tournament, beating out five other finalists from universities across the country. The tournament is held on by the United States Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) and the National Operations Center of Excellence (NOCoE). University of Michigan team member Xiatong Sun is an environmental graduate student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

Two CEE graduate students receive Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner award

Graduate students Ellen Thompson and Sebina Kalawadwala have received the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement from Michigan Engineering. Thompson’s research focuses on subsurface geochemistry for sustainable energy applications. Kalawadwala’s research focuses on how buildings with the same layout, but different lateral force resisting systems, might behave in fires.

CEE researchers receive Raymond C. Reese Research Prize

CEE PhD student Tung-Yu Wu and Professors Sherif El-Tawil and Jason McCormick received the 2019 Raymond C. Reese Research Prize for their paper “Highly Ductile Limits for Deep Steel Columns,” published in the Journal of Structural Engineering. This award, given by the Structural Engineering Institute, is presented to the authors of a paper that describes a notable achievement in research related to structural engineering and which indicates how the research can be used.