Professor Erol Tutumluer has been awarded the 2020 James Laurie Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineer’s (ASCE) Transportation and Development Institute for “career contributions to the advancement of transportation engineering in the field of transportation geotechnics, which provides key knowledge to building sustainable pavement and railroad track infrastructure.”
Tutumluer is a specialist in transportation geotechnics, with research interests that include applications of artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques to transportation infrastructure; subgrade soils and aggregate materials stabilization and recycling; use of geosynthetics in pavements and railroad track substructure; and mechanistic based designs of airport/highway pavements and railroad track. He has received many research and teaching honors, including multiple Best Paper awards, the Yangtze River Scholar Award (Ministry of Education, Beijing), and the Zeng Guoxi Lecture and Qiushi Distinguished Professor (Zhejiang University).
Tutumluer holds a B.S. (Bogazici University 1989), two M.S. degrees (Duke University 1991 and Georgia Tech 1993) and a Ph.D. (Georgia Tech 1995). He joined the CEE at Illinois faculty in 1996, where he is the Paul F. Kent Endowed Faculty Scholar and serves as the Transportation Group Coordinator and International Programs Director.
The James Laurie Prize is given annually to an ASCE member who has made a definite contribution to the advancement of transportation engineering, either in research, planning, design or construction. The award will be presented to Tutumluer at the ASCE International Conference on Transportation and Development in Seattle, Wash., May 26-29, 2020.