CCE

Oregon State researchers awarded the J. James R. Croes Medal for civil engineering research

From left, Jonathan C. Huffman, former civil engineering doctoral student at Oregon State and now an associate geotechnical engineer at Geotechnical Resources, Inc.; Armin Stuedlein, professor of geotechnical engineering; Andre Barbosa, professor of structural engineering; and Andre F. V. Belejo, former structural engineering doctoral student at Oregon State and now a design engineer at Seft Consulting Group.

A group of College of Engineering researchers has been awarded the J. James R. Croes Medal by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

A way with water

When asked why she has focused her career on water, Meghna Babbar-Sebens has a simple answer: “Water is life.”

Clean water is precious in India, where she grew up. According to a recent report by the World Bank, India contains 18% of the world’s population, but just 4% of the world’s water resources.

Measuring Glacier Melt

For decades, scientists have predicted sea-level rise as a major outcome of the warming climate, bringing with it significant impacts to coastal communities. Yet, accurately predicting how quickly and by how much the world’s oceans will rise remains challenging because of many complex factors controlling how glaciers and sea ice melt.

Wave Power: The Other Sustainable Energy

Graduate student Courtney Beringer makes adjustments to LUPA, a prototype wave energy converter tested at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab.

Photos by Johanna Carson and Chance Saechao.

What images pop up when you hear someone mention wind power and solar power? It’s a safe bet you’ll picture towering three bladed turbines, photovoltaic panels, or perhaps vast mirror arrays. But what do you see when you imagine the machinery used to harvest wave energy?

History by the barrel

In the fall of 2019, during the recently completed Merryfield Hall renovations, a plumber descended into a crawl space beneath the building to tap a water line for a new drinking fountain. He also found an odd bit of construction: a dozen concrete-filled barrels, aligned in two parallel rows, supporting a significant chunk of the building. The barrels, it turns out, had also been observed during a 2014 remodel of one of Merryfield’s labs. Who knows when anyone had seen them before that?

Spanning the globe

Photos courtesy of Rick Robertson.

Rick Robertson was barely a teenager when he started his first construction job. He dug catch basins, pushed concrete, and hauled materials through the long summer days. The hard work was nothing new.

A blueprint for career success

Although Tausha Smith considers herself a “late bloomer” in terms of her educational journey, she has blossomed powerfully, graduating in June with a bachelor’s degree in construction engineering management from Oregon State University and landing her dream job at Gerding Builders in Corvallis.

“I've always been a kinesthetic learner,” Smith said. “Ten years ago, while I was working on organic farms, a friend who worked on one of the farms was into welding and building, and she suggested I might be good at it.”

Bringing order, efficiency to mass transit design projects

Photos courtesy of Chris Tyndall.

The next time you hop on a subway or ride a train between terminals at an airport, give a nod to engineers like Chris Tyndall, B.S. civil engineering ’09. A design manager for Kiewit Corp.’s infrastructure engineering design group, Tyndall manages what he calls the “chaotic process” of combining electrical, mechanical, and communications systems in mass transit projects.