5/3/2010
Written by
The Board of Directors for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has elected Professor Imad Al-Qadi as a Distinguished Member for his exemplary leadership and innovation in the civil engineering profession. This extraordinary honor is reserved for only one out of over 7,500 ASCE members.
The ASCE defines a distinguished member as one who has made legendary contributions to the area of civil engineering and who has achieved eminence in his or her branch of engineering or field. Al-Qadi was specifically recognized for his extraordinary research and technical contributions in pavement engineering, modeling, rehabilitation technologies, pavement interlayer systems, asphaltic mixtures, transportation infrastructure sensing, and ground penetrating radar. He was also recognized for his exemplary leadership in professional service and technology transfer.
Prior to the 13 Distinguished Members elected this year, only 586 engineers in the 158-year history of ASCE have been honored with this distinction. Al-Qadi has joined these ranks and will officially be inducted during a black tie ceremony in Las Vegas this fall.
Al-Qadi received his Ph.D. from Penn State University and then joined the faculty at Virginia Tech University where he was promoted four years early to a full professor and shortly thereafter became the Charles E. Via Jr. Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In 2004, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is the Founder Professor of Engineering and the founding Director of the Illinois Center for Transportation (ICT). Al-Qadi was instrumental in the remarkable growth of the ICT, which has become one of the largest centers at the University of Illinois since its inception in 2005. He also serves as Director of the Advanced Transportation Research and Engineering Laboratory (ATREL).
Al-Qadi’s research and contributions to scholarly work in his field have been diverse. He was one of the first researchers developing ground-penetrating radar for a variety of transportation infrastructure applications and analysis techniques and was also a leader in full-scale testing, instrumentation, 3-dimensional modeling of pavements, and material characterization. He designed and instrumented the state-of-the-art Virginia Smart Road with his students and instrumented the first airport in Europe. He has led innovative research on pavement analysis, rehabilitation, preservation, and sustainability as well as nondestructive evaluation and pavement-tire interaction modeling. His innovative research has resulted in more than 475 publications, of which more than 240 are refereed papers, and delivering more than 400 presentations at various conferences.
Among his professional activities, Al-Qadi is currently the TRB Preservation and Maintenance Section Chair and a member of the ASCE Transportation and Development Institute Board of Governors and the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Pavement Engineering.
Al-Qadi is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2007 James Laurie Prize from ASCE, the 2006 C. Grant Mikel award from Transportation Research Board, and the 2002 International Geosynthetic Society Award. He was named to the Virginia Tech College of Engineering Dean’s List of Excellent Teachers nine times, was awarded the 2006 ASCE student chapter outstanding instructor award at the University of Illinois, and won the National Science Foundation Prestigious Young Investigator Award in 1994.
Founded in 1852, ASCE represents more than 147,000 members of the civil engineering profession worldwide, and is America's oldest national engineering society. ASCE’s vision is to position engineers as global leaders building a better quality of life.