August 31, 2025, will mark the retirement of Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Cumaraswamy “Vipu” Vipulanandan, placing the capstone on over forty years of service to the Cullen College of Engineering.
Vipulanandan began his career at the University of Houston as an assistant professor after completing his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Northwestern University in 1984. He was promoted to associate professor in 1990 and professor in 1995, and he served as CEE department chair from 2001 to 2009. He has served as the Director of the college’s Center for Innovative Grouting Materials and Technology (CIGMAT) since 1994, and as Director for the Texas Hurricane Center for Innovative Technology (THC-IT) since 2009.
He was recognized with the Cullen College of Engineering’s Young Faculty Research Excellence Award in 1989 and Senior Faculty Research Award in 2002, and in 2005, he received the Fluor Corporation Faculty Excellence Award — the college’s highest award at the time.
Vipulanandan’s research interests are numerous and diverse; since 1984, he has received over $14.8 million for more than 90 projects for which he served as PI or Co-PI.
“My main focus is to improve all human engineering operations — to make sure everything is safe and durable,” he said. “I work on diverse areas to make sure we can do things together to make the human life better in the future.”
One major area of focus for Vipulanandan has been highly sensing human made materials, or so-called “smart materials.” This focus includes not only inbuilt sensing capabilities for construction materials like cement, but real-time monitoring capabilities to best make use of the data they provide.
“At the moment, I’m the only person on Earth, after 7,000 years, to come up with a new method to monitor concrete and cement mixing — initially a slurry — to the entire service life, finishing as a solid. Concrete is used in all sorts of construction, including your house, roads, driveways; everything is made of concrete. Cement is used in oil, gas and water wells, and grouts are used to maintain and repair the infrastructures. I have developed a new method for monitoring the material properties of the concrete and cement and how well it can perform in the long-term,” he said.
In fact, he holds a patent for chemo-thermo-piezoresistive highly sensing smart cement with integrated real-time monitoring system, which is exactly what it sounds like: cement that is capable of monitoring its own chemical, thermal, and electrical changes, and wirelessly communicating this information back to a central monitoring system like a phone or computer in real-time. He has also developed a nondestructive electrical method to detect and quantify surface and bulk corrosion in metals and non-metallic materials. These are only two of his several patents of this caliber.
His work also extends to geotechnical soils, soil properties, and their improvement with grouts — materials injected into soil to not only increase its strength and durability, but to monitor for changes that might otherwise go undetected — as well as waste-reducing surfactants.
“We developed bacteria that will eat used vegetable oil and in turn produce soap — UH-biosurfactant in the literature — allowing us to recycle waste products. The bacteria are also producing electricity while they are degrading the oil to make surfactants; it’s called the microbial fuel cell, producing energy while waste is being treated,” he said.
Over the course of his career, Vipulanandan has collaborated with the Department of Energy, NSF, EPA, National Cooperative Highway Research Program, TxDOT, Texas Hazardous Waste Research Center, and the City of Houston as well as Shell, Chevron, and other industrial companies. Despite his many partnerships and the interest of other universities around the country upon his stepping down as department chair in 2009, he has remained with the Cullen College of Engineering for one very special reason.
“The reason I have stayed here is our alumni — our future civil engineers and also leaders,” he said. “They really are good humans. I try to help them in their work and guide them, to help them grow professionally. The alumni really keep me in Houston.”
His dedication to his students is clear in his attitude as he describes the way he tells new students to refer to him in class: his last name may be shortened to Vipu, rather than Vipulanandan, because “my name is very long. Maybe difficult to spell. But I tell my students, I am Vipu: the Very Important Person for You.”
In 42 years, Vipulanandan — or Vipu — has graduated 36 Ph.D. students and 90 master’s students, all with successful theses. Though he’s retiring on paper, he has no plans to slow down after wrapping up his time with the University of Houston.
“I will continue. I have developed a lot of models that the world is using, and I am passionate to keep working with the people around me, to continue what I’m doing. We have limited time in life, but how much we can do in even just a few months.”