5/15/2015 Kristina Shidlauski
Written by Kristina Shidlauski
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded 29 Graduate Research Fellowships to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students this year, of which five are from the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The prestigious fellowships are awarded to outstanding students who are pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and who are considered to have great potential for important achievements in their field.
“Receiving five NSF Graduate Research Fellowship awards out of a total of 29 on campus this year is a great testimony to the quality of graduate students we have in CEE and reflects highly on the faculty engagement in mentoring these students, tackling relevant society challenges, and the exciting research discoveries happening in the department,” said Jeffery R. Roesler, Associate Head for Graduate Affairs.
As NSF Graduate Research Fellows, CEE students Diana Byrne, Christopher Chini, Martha Cuenca, Jeffrey Kwang and Daniel Mosiman will receive three years of financial support, including an annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 cost-of-education allowance. Fellows also have options for professional development opportunities and access to supercomputing resources.
Diana Byrne received her B.S. in Civil Engineering at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Mo., and expects to receive her master’s degree in Civil Engineering in July 2015, in the area of Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems (SRIS), before moving on to her doctorate work. She has been working with assistant professor Jeremy S. Guest and professor Imad L. Al-Qadi in the cross-disciplinary SRIS program, but her Ph.D. focus will be in environmental engineering with Guest. Byrne plans to study the environmental and public health implications of agricultural intensification in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, she plans to model water quantity and quality in order to connect agricultural decision-making to environmental and public health impacts.
Chris Chini completed his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University before getting his M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and is working with research assistant professor Joshua M. Peschel as part of the SRIS program. His research focus is on stress-strain curves, which display the state or strain of a material with a given stress. Chini’s research will focus on abstracting this concept from a single material to an overall system. He hopes to create a visualization tool that supports decision-making by displaying a system state or strain with a given stress. This will include quantification of system states including resilience and sustainability. Initially the tool will focus on sanitary sewer systems but can be generalized to any civil infrastructure system.
Martha Cuenca is currently pursuing her M.S. degree in Civil Engineering and plans to work on her doctoral degree upon completion. She received her B.S. degree in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College. Working in the area of structural dynamics and structural health monitoring, she is working with Professor Billie F. Spencer Jr. as a graduate research assistant in his Smart Structures Technology Laboratory. She is currently helping in the development of a new wireless smart sensor for structural health monitoring applications. She hopes to participate in the NSF Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide program in the future.
Jeffrey Kwang did his undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins University, receiving a B.S. from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. At Illinois, he is working on his Master’s degree in Environmental Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering, with professor Gary Parker. Kwang plans to investigate the dynamics and reorganization of drainage networks using landscape evolution models. The networks, which are important for routing both sediment and water and shaping landscapes, take on a general tree-like (“dendritic”) form—a form which some argue to be optimal through minimization of energy expenditure. Kwang hopes to understand whether this optimality holds true or not through reduced complexity numerical modeling.
Daniel Mosiman, who received his B.S. in Civil Engineering at Illinois, is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering. Working with professor and department head Benito Mariñas, Mosiman is focusing his studies on drinking water treatment and developing ways to remove fluoride from drinking water using low-cost materials. Fluoride occurs naturally at toxic levels in many groundwater sources and has a devastating effect on millions of people. Mosiman’s goal is to create better materials for fluoride adsorption by understanding the surface properties and chemical mechanisms of fluoride removal of current materials, and manipulating those materials or their environment to achieve greater performance. He hopes to create a material that even people in extreme poverty can use.