Didem Ozevin, associate professor of Civil and Materials Engineering in the UIC College of Engineering, recently appeared in a CBS 2 News segment about a bridge in Joliet. CBS said the I-80 Des Plaines River Bridge in Joliet has “one of the worst structural ratings in the state.” CBS 2 sent a report and photos to Ozevin for her expert objective perspective. “There’s some permanent deformation,” she said. She also said that she’d think twice about driving over the bridges. “When I see so many members with aerial loss and deformation that makes me very concerned passing through those bridges,” Ozevin said. Throughout the last month, Ozevin has been called by the media several times to provide an expert analysis…

Didem Ozevin, associate professor of Civil and Materials Engineering in the UIC College of Engineering, appeared in a CBS 2 News segment about the damaged Lake Shore Drive bridge that led to closures last month and emergency repairs in Chicago. “Right now the load is carried by those towers, so once they remove the towers, the load will transfer from the girder to the expansion joint. And they can make sure that all the stresses are below the limit. And so we can safely use that new retrofitted connection,” Ozevin said. Watch the segment at https://cbsloc.al/2XBNwBG

A journal paper co-authored by CME Professor Krishna Reddy was named the best of 2018. The paper, “Field-Scale Phytoremediation of Mixed Contaminants in Upland Area of Big Marsh Site, Chicago, USA,” published in Indian Geotechnical Journal, was deemed the best paper published in the journal and awarded the IGS- AIMIL Biennial Award. The paper documents a collaboration between Reddy, his student Gema Amaya-Santos, and Chicago Park District Environmental Engineer Daniel E. Cooper, and their findings as they worked to fix a contamination problem at the Big Marsh. The Big Marsh is a park on the Chicago’s South Side in the Lake Calumet area, which is approximately 280 acres of marshland and vegetation, and almost as big as Grant Park. “The…

Didem Ozevin, associate professor of Civil and Materials Engineering at UIC, was featured in a CBS 2 Chicago news segment as an engineering expert to talk about the Lake Shore Drive bridge crack that led to closures on the bridge last week. Ozevin joined reporter Lauren Victory under the bridge to discuss other issues it may have. Watch the segment at https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/02/21/lake-shore-drive-bridge-corrosion-cracks/. Her research interests focus on sensor development to combine a variety of sensing elements and to develop new structural evaluation methods for understanding the damage states using variety of structural health monitoring techniques. She uses multi-physic models to understand the wave propagation phenomena on various structures to develop simple damage characterization methodologies that can be used as embedded algorithms…

Every year, many outstanding students compete to win the prestigious IL-ITE student paper award, but only one student can take home the honor. This year, Amir Bahador Parsa, a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Materials Engineering (CME), won the Best Paper Award with his paper “Real-time Accident Detection: Coping with Imbalanced Data.” He received a $1000 award during the ITE Illinois Section Annual Banquet at The Union League Club of Chicago on January 25. The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) is an international professional society of more than 13,000 transportation engineers.  “I am extremely honored to be receiving such an important award. Being awarded with the best paper award only one year after starting my PhD program…