Month: May 2014

Welcome IITK Scholars

This morning we held our first IITK-VT partnership summer meeting, during which we welcomed three visiting scholars from IITK to Virginia Tech. Anshita Agrawal, Abishek Saraf, and Saurabh Dixit will be spending eight weeks at Virginia Tech working with Prof. Sunil Sinha, Prof. Brian Kleiner, and me. The scholars will undertake research focusing on resilient water infrastructure, construction safety, and sustainable infrastructure development, and will support the development of a new course on urban infrastructure that will offered this fall semester.

The pictures below were taken during our meeting using Google Glass.

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Congratulations James Bryce!

PictureOn May 2, 2014, James Bryce successfully defended his dissertation in Civil Engineering. His research focused on how to model the environmental impacts of infrastructure management alternatives applied to pavements. James found that by modifying infrastructure management approaches slightly, the energy consumption attributed to the lifecycle of a pavement network can be reduced significantly. By developing an approach to visualizing the interaction between the most cost effective approach and the approaches where energy consumption is minimized, James created a way for transportation agencies to make more informed decisions regarding the environmental and economic impacts of their pavement management plans.

James will begin a position as a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham (UK) in July as part of the Sustainable Pavement & Railway Initial Training Network, a project commissioned by many partner institutions throughout the European Union.  The focus of his research will be to define sustainability assessment factors and current state of the art sustainable practices within the European road and rail network.

I served on James’s doctoral committee with Gerardo Flintsch (Committee Chair), Nadarajah Sivaneswaran, Christian Wernz, and Pam Murray-Tuite.

The pictures below were taken through Google Glass during James’s defense.

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Congratulations Nathalie Graham!

DSCN1353bOn April 16, 2014, Nathalie Graham successfully defended her capstone project for her Masters degree in Natural Resources. Nathalie’s project examined extended producer responsibility (EPR), a policy approach that aims to incentivize greener design and internalize the full environmental costs of a product by making its producer responsible for its entire life cycle. She analyzed EPR laws in the European Union and the United States to develop policy recommendations for packaging waste in the US.

In addition to her Masters degree from Virginia Tech, Nathalie holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and International Relations from the University of California, Davis. Before graduate school, Nathalie worked for several environmental and corporate accountability organizations.

I served on Nathalie’s committee with Desiree Di Mauro (committee chair) and Kieran Lindsey.

Talk at the Table – Binary Economics

On Sunday, May 4, a conversation between Robert Ashford, Joyce Rothschild, Woody Crenshaw, and I aired on Talk at the Table with Andy Morikawa. During our conversation, we explain the basic idea of binary economics and how it relates to critical issues such as growing income inequality and sustainable development.

Soundwave

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IDPS Final Presentations

This afternoon, students in the International Development Planning Studio (IDPS) presented their final project proposals to a review panel of international development experts from Virginia Tech. This final session of the studio provides students with an opportunity to showcase and defend what they have been able to develop over the past 14 weeks. This year, I was very pleased to have Susan Marmagas (Public Health), Michael Bertelsen (Director, OIRED), Kurt Richter (Associate Director, OIRED), and John Browder (SPIA) serve as members of the review panel. I’d like to congratulate the students on making it through the event and for giving a series of professional and high-quality presentations.

The images below (taken #throughglass) capture a few key moments from the final studio session.

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