Season’s Greetings!

At UVM, we are winding down the fall semester and 2022 – another exciting year that brought numerous successes of our students, faculty and staff.

Above: Casa Grande, a 700-year-old earthen great house in central AZ. The shelter (1932) was designed, in part, by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr and is itself a National Historic Landmark. Photo by Neil Dixon, The Front Standard.

In October, Prof. Doug Porter began a new phase of a National Park Service-funded research focused on the mid-fourteenth-century great house of the ancestral Sonoran Desert people at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument in Arizona. The four-story great house, of puddled earth or cob construction, is the largest of the structures located within a series of walled compounds that include an elliptical ball court, a platform mound, and an extensive canal system.

In 1892, Casa Grande became the first federally designated archaeological reservation in the United States and was a catalyst for development of the Antiquities Act (1906), allowing presidents to establish national monuments. Doug has been working with Angelyn Bass of University of New Mexico and others on micromorphological characterization of the earthen construction materials, documenting earthen finishes, and assessing seismic vulnerability of individual wall segments. The new research phase is focused on the deterioration of ancient earthen finishes as the result of multiple environmental stresses.

Land use planners and researchers in Vermont now have access to maps that show how floods of different sizes are expected to spread across surfaces within river valleys. Created to show a simplified representation of what different severity flood zones might look like across the landscape for conservation and land-use planners, each color on the maps represents one of eight storm sizes, from 2-year to 500-year annual exceedance probability.

Researchers at the University of Vermont, Dr. Rebecca Diehl from the Department of Geography and CEE faculty Kristen Underwood and graduate student Scott Lawson have generated a continuous map of topographically defined floodplains for Vermont’s Lake Champlain basin rivers that drain more than two square miles.

This work contributed to Vermont’s Functioning Floodplain Initiative (FFI) to develop methods and mapping to identify, restore, and protect high priority stream, wetland, and floodplain functions.

Kennedy Brown received one of four 2022 ASTM International Graduate Scholarships

Kennedy finished her BS Civil Engineering degree last year from us and is now a MS student working with Prof. Matt Scarborough. She was commended by the selection committee for her academic performance, leadership, and technical knowledge relevant to a number of ASTM Committees. Kennedy’s thesis research explores the use of novel bioreactors to convert wastewater from dairy processing to methane for heat and power generation.

Molly Baker received the prestigious Tau Beta Pi scholarship

Molly is a senior studying environmental engineering, vice president of Engineers Without Borders, and a member of the UVM competitive climbing team. She is conducting research with Prof. Raju Badireddy on biofilm mitigation using magnetic nanoparticles with applications for NASA. Molly received the prestigious Tau Beta Pi scholarship.

Capstone service project team impresses Representative Peter Welch

At UVM-CEE, our capstone projects have been real, service-learning projects with Vermont communities since 2006. Over the years, our students have completed over 150 different community-based capstone projects from stormwater management systems; retrofits for existing bridges, streets and buildings; new bridges; pipelines for small hydropower plants; wastewater systems; restoration of historic structures; and remediation alternatives for landslides.

This semester in the capstone course taught by Prof. John Lens, one of our capstone student teams of Amanda Kornutiak, Brendan Lombard, Kimani Mighty, and Hazel O’Brien is working with the Stowe Electric Department on restoring the Seaver Sawmill and Hydroelectric project at Moscow Mills. The team presented their mid-semester design update to Stowe Electric, and U.S. Representative Peter Welch. The student team is designing vehicle and pedestrian access improvements at this Moscow village site, to support repurposing the 200-year-old abandoned mill on the West Branch of the Little River for community use. Representative Welch showed keen interest in the project, asked students several questions, and thanked them for their engagement in Vermont communities.

Vermont ASCE awards Mandar Dewoolkar as Engineer of the Year

Vermont ASCE awarded Prof. Mandar Dewoolkar as the Engineer of the Year recognizing his work and service at UVM and in the state of Vermont over the last 20 years. Mandar’s teaching and research have been in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering, infrastructure systems, and hazard assessment and mitigation.

Erin Sisson ‘11 (formerly Parizo) always had an eye for problem solving and working as a strong team to achieve a shared vision. While attending UVM, she held engineering internships with the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission, Burlington Department of Public Works, and Resource Systems Group which fostered her interest in transportation engineering. After graduating, she joined the VT office of VHB for nearly 5 years before moving to the VT Agency of Transportation. In her role in project management, she helped lead all of the design aspects of multimodal traffic and safety projects. In 2018 she was named Vermont's Young Engineer of the Year and in 2021 she was promoted to the Deputy Chief Engineer of the Agency.

Robert Calderon PE, SE ‘13 Currently works at Severud Associates, a top tier structural engineering firm in NYC. After completing his BS from UVM, Robert got his MS from Columbia University. Robert is a licensed Structural Engineer (SE) in the state of New York and Nevada and has worked on an array of structures including mid-rise office and residential buildings, medical research facilities and art museums. Robert has also been a member of SEAONY’s young member group that focuses on engaging and helping students at the collegiate level become young professionals in structural engineering.

Dr. Milad Roohi received his PhD from UVM CEE in 2019 with Professors Eric Hernandez and David Rosowsky. Milad’s doctoral research investigated performance-based seismic monitoring of instrumented buildings. Following his PhD, Milad worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, and then as a Senior Scientist at Aon (the world's largest reinsurance intermediary) in the Impact Forecasting Catastrophe Modeling R&D Center of Excellence. This fall, Milad joined the Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. He plans to investigate the interplay and connection between the multi-disciplinary data, algorithms, computational models, and emerging technologies to improve the performance, monitoring, and resilience of interconnected civil infrastructure and urban systems against deterioration, natural hazards, and climate change.