Tooting our own horn: Recent awards
2006 concrete bridge award
The Wapello County Mars Hill Bridge was one of 10 winners named by the Portland Cement Association and Roads and Bridges magazine. The Bridge Engineering Center has been evaluating the performance of ultra high performance concrete girders. More about the project.
Shauna Hallmark
Young Engineering Faculty Research Award
Shauna Hallmark, CTRE transportation engineer and associate professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, won the College of Engineering’s Young Engineering Faculty Research Award last fall.
The award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated the ability to conduct original research, contribute to scholarly literature, and introduce new and/or improved laboratory techniques and instrumentation. It also recognizes faculty whose research has had an impact. Hallmark's research focuses on three main areas: traffic safety, transportation air quality, and traffic engineering and operations. The work that caught the faculty council’s attention was Hallmark’s study on heavy truck operation speeds versus passenger car operation speeds. “Transportation emissions are related to speed, so we looked at 10 sites and quantified the data,” she says. “The Environmental Protection Agency picked up the study and used in rulemaking for heavy trucks.”
Hallmark is excited about her current research on traffic calming in small Iowa communities. The project is similar to studies done in Europe, but is the first of its kind to be done in the United States. Hallmark is studying small towns that have one main road passing through it where drivers don’t slow down. So far, she’s used various types of treatments, such as pavement markers and tubular markers, to study traffic in the Iowa towns of Dexter, Slater, Gilbert, Union, and Roland. The research project is funded by the Federal Highway Administration Board and the Iowa Highway Research Board.
(adapted from an article in the fall 2006 issue of CCEE News)
Midwest Transportation Consortium (MTC) Student of the Year
Iowa State University PhD student Joshua Hochstein was named MTC student of the year for 2006. Hochstein was selected based upon his strong record of research and scholarship.
A two-time Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship winner (2005 and 2006), Hochstein researches traffic safety data analysis, roadway design, and rural expressway intersections.
$1,000 student paper prize
Mustafa Birkan Bayrak, graduate student in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at ISU, was named winner of the 2006 research paper competition sponsored by the Midwest Transportation Consoritum. He was awarded a $1,000 prize for his paper, “Backcalculation of Layer Moduli for Jointed Plain Concrete Pavement Systems Using Artificial Neural Networks.”
Award-winning handbook produced by CTRE researchers and publications staff.
Technical communication award
CTRE technical writer Oksana Opsomer and graphic designer Alison Weidemann received the Award of Distinguished Technical Communication from the Society for Technical Communication for their editing and design of Toolbox to Address Safety and Operations on School Grounds and Public Streets Adjacent to Elementary and Middle Schools in Iowa. This document was a product of a research project conducted by Shauna Hallmark (see above) and graduate students Hillary Isebrands and Xiaojia (Joanna) Liu. Learn more about the project.
American Graphic Design Award
In 2005, Alison Weidemann, CTRE's graphic designer, led the charge to redesign CTRE's visual identity (7 mb pdf). The results were stunning. Graphic Design USA thought so too and presented Alison with an American Graphic Design Award for excellent in communication and graphic design in 2006.
