Civil and Materials Engineering (CME) students rebuilt Chicago’s iconic skyline. Under the direction of Professor Sybil Derrible, CME junior Jacob Miguest spent the summer laying the ground work for a 3D metropolis in the College of Engineering’s Makerspace. Now, the mini metropolis is on display in the CME department’s atrium in the Engineering Research Facility, 842 W. Taylor St. “The miniature replica was created to provide a model of the Chicago Loop to analyze how cities are built,” said Miguest, who printed more than 100 buildings. “The purpose is to look at the density, spacing, and logic of how buildings are placed in Chicago.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbr1HoanJic Setting up engineering students for success Miguest isn’t the only student learning from the project.…

The systems that help us heat and cool our homes, provide drinking water, take away our garbage, let us communicate instantly with one another and enable travel — collectively known as infrastructure — will need to be designed differently in the future to become more sustainable and resilient. In a paper published in MRS Energy & Sustainability, University of Illinois at Chicago civil engineer Sybil Derrible lays out two key sustainability principles that can be applied to infrastructure systems that would make cities both more sustainable and more resilient: reducing the demand for resources — whether it’s water, electricity or additional transportation infrastructure like roads — and increasing the supply of those resources, within reason. Read the full story at UIC Today.

Today, about 25 percent of workers in STEM careers — those involving science, technology, engineering and math — are women. But back in 1968, when Nancy Holmes was the first woman to earn a degree in engineering from the UIC College of Engineering, the percentage of women in science or engineering careers was diminishingly small. For Holmes, who grew up in Oak Park, the probability that she would go into the sciences was high from the start — several uncles and her grandfather were civil engineers, her brother is an architectural engineer, her father was an engineer at Zenith Radio and two aunts had advanced math degrees. Her mother had a job in hospital nutrition and was well-versed in chemistry.…

John Mulrow, a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Materials Engineering (CME), partnered with a team of scientists from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRDGC), a professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and professionals from Ensaras, Inc., to win second place at the inaugural “LIFT Intelligent Water Systems Challenge.” The national competition, hosted by the Leaders Innovation Forum for Technology (LIFT), a joint effort of the Water Environment Federation and the Water Research Foundation, challenged participants to develop new tools to improve local water and environmental quality through data analytics and artificial intelligence. It featured 19 teams of students, professionals and technology experts who used innovation and data to help solve difficult real-world…

CME Assistant Professor Sean Vitousek was quoted recently in a Wired story about sea-level rise in Los Angeles. Engineers are also getting better at figuring out exactly where to focus their efforts as sea levels rise. Researchers, for instance, build models of how waves will look in a particular area. “From comparing the model to how it performed over the historical data, we can sort of get a sense of is this model performing in a realistic manner,” says Sean Vitousek, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “And then we can use various projections in terms of sea level rise and wave heights going forward to sort of extrapolate where the shoreline might be over a long…

PhD candidate Jyoti K. Chetri has a strong work ethic and an even stronger desire to make the world a better place. It is this drive that helped the Department of Civil and Materials Engineering student win a Chicago Consular Corps (CCC) Scholarship for the academic year 2018-2019 from UIC’s Office of International Affairs (OIA). She is one of only a several successful applicants university-wide who were “favorably reviewed” and awarded the $1,000 scholarship. Eligibility for the scholarship is limited to students who have a minimum cumulative UIC GPA of 3.5 (on a 4-point scale). Chetri, of Nepal, is working under the direction of CME Professor Krishna R. Reddy in the Sustainable Engineering Research Lab and the Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental…