Research Soaring to New Heights on the Tails of NASA Satellites

Andrea Albright, a graduate student in the Cullen College of Engineering’s geosensing systems engineering and sciences program, won a 2018 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. She is among 69 U.S. fellows chosen from more than 3,600 applicants.

Houston civil engineer D. Wayne Klotz (1976 MSCE) has added another feather in his cap. The University of Houston alumnus recently became the fourth recipient of an Outstanding Practitioner in Water Resources Engineering Award from the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers (AAWRE), a subsidiary of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

In April, representatives of the University of Houston’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) traveled to Dalian Maritime University (DMU) in Dalian, People’s Republic of China, to write and sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that will bring what is expected to be a continuous stream of DMU students to CEE’s M.S. and Ph.D. programs.

Three days a week Konrad Krakowiak, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, stands before 13 students that make up his Cullen College engineering materials course to talk about concrete. Eighteen-hundred miles away, at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Professor Franz-Josef Ulm does the same thing, teaching the same course to his six students.

Approximately 120 Houston high school students blasted onto the UH campus to launch into engineering! The 5th annual “Launch into Engineering” is a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) outreach event to attract college-bound students to the STEM fields.

Aside from attaining knowledge itself, most students attend college to find a path forward in their lives, searching for a career that suits them. At the Engineering Career Fair, that job is made easier as company representatives from the Houston area drop in to offer opportunities, mentor students and share stories of how they went from being a college student to a company employee.

A scant few months before she defends her dissertation for a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, Aparna Balasubramani found herself on a podium in New Orleans in January receiving an award for a paper she wrote on ridding waterways of toxic chemicals.

As a Ph.D. student in environmental engineering, Amin Kiaghadi already has a patent under his belt and won awards for his idea of how to treat “produced water,” the dirty, non-usable water created during hydraulic fracturing.

A civil and environmental engineering student from the UH Cullen College of Engineering was recently awarded the Robert J. Melosh Medal for his doctoral dissertation in the area of finite element methods and computational mechanics.