The following members were elected fellows of the Society in recent months. ASCE fellows are legally registered professional engineers or land surveyors who have made significant technical or professional contributions and have demonstrated notable achievement in responsible charge of engineering activity for at least 10 years following election to the ASCE grade of member. Fellows occupy the Society’s second-highest membership grade, exceeded only by distinguished members.VITOR ABRANTES, Ph.D, P.E., F.ASCE, holds a doctorate in civil engineering from the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), in Portugal, and is currently a professor there. In addition to his teaching and research work, Abrantes serves on various FEUP committees and is developing a master’s degree program in engineering construction that will be recognized by all European Union countries. He also represents the FEUP on committees of the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction and serves on the editorial boards of the journals
Cadernos d'Obra, Sebentas d’Obra, and
Livros d’Obra. Abrantes has helped to organize numerous conferences and has nearly 150 scientific articles to his credit on such topics as building rehabilitation, energy conservation, and construction, and some of his work has appeared in international journals. Since 1989 he has been a partner of a consulting company. In addition to serving as a coordinator and consultant, he has developed hundreds of engineering projects.
N. CATHERINE BAZAN-ARIAS, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, earned a bachelor of science in 1992, a master of science in 1994, and a doctorate in 1999, all in civil engineering and all from the University of Pittsburgh. Bazan-Arias has extensive experience in analyzing soil-structure interactions for the design of dams and retaining structures, the siting of transmission lines, and the management of coal combustion products. Her projects have included the analysis and design of dams and other structures subjected to gravity, seismic, and wind loads. The work has encompassed new, retrofit, and rehabilitation designs for earth, rock, mine tailing, and concrete dams and appurtenances, and she has also been involved in the instrumentation and monitoring of several dams. The information gathered from monitoring pore water pressures and slope movements has led to a number of innovative solutions for her clients. An employee of DiGioia, Gray & Associates, LLC, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, she has held ASCE positions at the local, regional, and national levels, among them at-large director on the Board of Direction and president of the Pittsburgh Section’s Geo-Institute chapter, and since 2005 she has been an editor of the magazine
Geo-Strata. Bazan-Arias has been the recipient of numerous awards. ASCE named her a diversity champion in 2002, and the Pittsburgh Section honored her with its Young Civil Engineer Award. She is also a part-time instructor at Carnegie Mellon University, where she teaches structural analysis.
JOSEPH G. BURNS, P.E., S.E., CEng, LEED AP, F.ASCE, holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Notre Dame and master’s degrees in architecture and civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Burns is a is practice leader, a managing principal, and a member of the board of directors at Thornton Tomasetti, Inc. His project credits span the globe and include a wide variety of building types, including commercial, educational, residential, and retail, as well as museums and structures for health care, the performing arts, athletics, and aviation. This expertise in design and construction has been shared through more than 30 professional papers and through lectures and other publications. In the realm of education he has been a member of the civil and environmental engineering department’s advisory committee at Northwestern University and a member of the design council at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Maryland, where he was named a distinguished professor in 2005. In 2003
Engineering News-Record included him on its list of the year’s 25 most newsworthy individuals for his innovative application of models based on software developed by Tekla, of Espoo, Finland, to steel delivery for Chicago’s Soldier Field, and in 2008 the American Institute of Steel Construction honored him with its Special Achievement Award. Burns is also a peer reviewer for the U.S. General Services Administration’s Design and Construction Excellence Program.
SHERIF EL-TAWIL, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, earned a bachelor of science in civil engineering in 1989 and a master of science in structural engineering in 1991, both from Cairo University, in Egypt, and received a doctorate in civil engineering from Cornell University in 1996. El-Tawil is a professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and associate chair of the school’s civil and environmental engineering department, and his research focuses on the computational modeling, analysis, and testing of structural materials and systems. He is especially interested in how buildings and bridges behave under the extreme loading conditions generated by such man-made and natural hazards as seismic excitations, collisions, and blasts, and he is exploring the use of new materials, concepts, and technologies to create innovative structural systems that mitigate the potentially catastrophic effects of extreme loading. Much of his research is directed towards the computational and theoretical aspects of structural engineering, and he has given special attention to computational simulation, constitutive modeling, multiscale techniques, macroplasticity formulations, nonlinear solution strategies, and visualization methods. He has more than 175 technical papers to his credit, 70 of them in refereed journals, and he coauthored
Recommendations for Seismic Design of Hybrid Coupled Wall Systems (Reston, Virginia: ASCE Press, 2010). El-Tawil has also conducted research on human decision making, the social interactions during extreme events, and the use of agent-based models for egress simulations. The editor in chief of ASCE’s
Journal of Structural Engineering, he also lends his time and expertise to various committees of the Structural Engineering Institute. He is the holder of two patents, and he has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them a best-paper award from the Korea Concrete Institute and ASCE’s Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, Moisseiff Award (on two occasions), Arthur M. Wellington Prize, State-of-the-Art of Civil Engineering Award, and Norman Medal.
KONSTANTINOS GIANNAKOS, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, is a leader in railway engineering, and his pioneering research has elucidated the ballast-sleeper-fastening system. After more than 15 years of research involving laboratory tests and theoretical analyses, Giannakos has developed a theoretical approach for calculating the actions on railway track, as well as approaches for determining the track mass participating in the motion of the nonsuspended masses of railway vehicles and for predicting the ballast fouling for certain types of sleepers. He has numerous publications in scientific journals and conference proceedings to his credit, and he has served on a number of European Union committees. From 1998 to 2002 he was the general coordinator of the group within the International Union of Railways concerned with high-speed rail in southeastern Europe, and from 2002 to 2006 he was the chief executive officer and president of the Hellenic Railways Organisation. Since 2006 he has been a visiting professor of railway engineering at Greece’s University of Thessaly, and he has also taught graduate courses in transportation engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. At present he is the project director of SALFO & Associates SA on work for the Saudi Railway Company in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Giannakos also serves on Transportation Research Board committees dealing with the design and maintenance of railways. His outside scholarly interests include the technology used in ancient Greece, and he is a member of the Association of Ancient Greek Technology Studies.
RUSLAN HASSAN, Ph.D., P.Eng., F.ASCE, earned a master of science in sanitary engineering from Syracuse University in 1984 and holds a doctorate in soil and water engineering. A former research fellow at Birmingham University, in the United Kingdom, Hassan was the founding director of the Environmental Research Center at Malaysia’s Universiti Teknologi MARA, where he also taught civil engineering courses in the architecture department. A professor of civil and environmental engineering and a senior research fellow at the Malaysia Institute of Transport, Hassan has presented six keynote addresses at conferences and has more than 100 papers to his credit. He was the project director and later a project specialist for the Jelutong Sewage Treatment Plant, on the Malaysian island of Penang, and he was the environmental specialist for a rail track electrification project and for a river restoration project in the Penang Cybercity district. He has also pioneered the application of “green” reverse logistics strategies for supply chains in Malaysia and has carried out research on sustainable construction through the use of industrialized building systems. Hassan is the president of Malaysia’s Confederation of Scientific and Technological Associations and has also been a member of the Board of Engineers Malaysia. The recipient of numerous awards, he is a member of the board of trustees of the Construction Research Institute of Malaysia, and in recognition of his outstanding contributions in sustainable soil and water engineering, he has been inducted into the Academy of Sciences Malaysia. Hassan is registered as a professional engineer in Malaysia.
HANADI S. RIFAI, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon, in 1982, and a master of science and a doctorate in environmental engineering from Rice University in respectively 1985 and 1989. Rifai joined the civil and environmental engineering faculty at the University of Houston in 1997 as an assistant professor and in 2007 was named a full professor. In January 2010 she was appointed the director of the university’s environmental engineering graduate program, and she is also one of the directors of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters Center there. Before joining the University of Houston she was the executive director of Rice University’s Energy and Environmental Systems Institute, and prior to that she held faculty fellow and research associate positions in Rice’s environmental science and engineering department. Rifai has pioneered change in the groundwater remediation industry and made transformative contributions in the field of bioremediation and natural attenuation of hydrocarbons and chlorinated solvents in groundwater. Her work has led to significant changes in the subsurface remediation industry. On the basis of her research, remediation professionals have adopted risk-based cleanup targets that incorporate the natural attenuation capacities of groundwater systems. As a member of ASTM International committees, Rifai has helped to develop risk-based national standards and natural attenuation standards for use by the remediation industry, for example,
Standard Guide for Risk-Based Corrective Action Applied at Petroleum Release Sites (ASTM E1739) and
Standard Guide for Remediation of Ground Water by Natural Attenuation at Petroleum Release Sites (ASTM E1943). She is also one of the authors of the text
Natural Attenuation of Fuels and Chlorinated Solvents in the Subsurface (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 1999).
CLIFFORD IAN "TOM" ROBERTS, P.E., F.ASCE, was born in 1928 in Bowral, Australia. He attended school in Darwin, in the extreme north of the country, and in Burrinjuck, in the south, and in 1950 received a bachelor of engineering degree from the University of Sydney. In a career that spanned 40 years, Roberts, now retired, applied his engineering expertise in Australia’s civil and mining industries, and his adherence to engineering and ethical standards guided his efforts in the areas of economic feasibility studies, financing, marketing, and project construction and commissioning. The mining projects in which he was involved included coal as well as ores of titanium, zirconium, lead, zinc, nickel, tin, phosphate, gold, and diamonds. To ensure that the methods employed and the equipment used were state of the art, Roberts visited Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and South Africa for purposes of study. Between 1953 and 1958 he led the design, construction, and commissioning of a titanium and zirconium plant, and in the 1960s he formed a civil construction company that grew from 10 employees to 100. In the 1980s he led the engineering and construction work on two lead and zinc mine complexes on the Australian island of Tasmania.
KENNETH E. SECOR, D.Eng., P.E., F.ASCE, is a native of Sacramento, California, and holds three degrees in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a doctorate there in 1961. Early in what became a lengthy career with the California State University system, Secor conducted groundbreaking research in concert with Carl L. Monismith, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, into the viscoelastic properties of asphaltic mixtures. He was also a significant contributor as a young faculty member to the creation of the computer science and engineering programs at California State University at Chico and to the accreditation of the latter. Later he managed the original master planning at California State University at Bakersfield and oversaw the budgeting, design, construction, and operation of the new institution’s growing physical facilities until his retirement, in 1995, as vice president emeritus. In 1971 Secor helped found the Southern San Joaquin Branch of ASCE’s Los Angeles Section and later served as its third president. After retiring he continued working as a private consultant and was then recruited by the chancellor of California State University to serve on the central project management team for a decade-long, systemwide technology infrastructure upgrade valued at nearly $300 million that was deemed critical to meeting the needs of 21st-century students attending the university’s 23 campuses. Now fully retired, Secor resides in Bakersfield with his wife of 58 years, Mary Lou.
SCOTT T. SMITH, Ph.D., CPEng, F.ASCE, earned bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from the University of New South Wales, in Australia, in respectively 1994 and 1999. Smith is an associate professor in the civil engineering department at the University of Hong Kong and is also a member of ASCE’s Hong Kong Section. His research is concerned with the strengthening of concrete, metallic, and timber structures with fiber-reinforced polymer composites. In addition to winning funds in Hong Kong, China, and Australia to support his research activities, he has more than 125 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers to his credit. His research findings have been incorporated into U.S., Hong Kong, and Australian design guidelines, and he has won several research and teaching awards over the years. He has served on the editorial board of ASCE’s
Journal of Composites for Construction since 2008, and he has reviewed numerous papers for five other ASCE journals. As president of the Hong Kong chapter of Engineers Australia, he is working to forge links with ASCE’s Hong Kong Section in order to give engineers in Hong Kong and Australia a better understanding of ASCE’s activities.
JUN YANG, Ph.D., F.ASCE, earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1992 and a doctorate in geotechnical engineering in 1996, both from Zhejiang University, in China. In recognition of his work in elucidating site effects on ground motion in the earthquake that ravaged Kobe, Japan, in 1995, that country’s Kyoto University honored him with a second doctorate in 2001. A member of the faculty at the University of Hong Kong since 2003, Yang has more than 120 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conference proceedings to his credit. His work on earthquake ground responses, soil liquefaction, dynamic soil properties, and pile foundations is widely recognized by academics and practitioners. Yang sits on two technical committees of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering and has served on committees for a number of international conferences. His numerous accolades include a 1997 research fellowship from Kyoto University’s Disaster Prevention Research Institute, a best-paper award at the 2000 conference of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, a fellowship in 2001 from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the 2007 Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the University of Hong Kong. Yang has been instrumental in the growth and development of ASCE’s Hong Kong Section and served as its 2010–11 president.
Fellow applications may be obtained from ASCE’s world headquarters, in Reston, Virginia, by calling (800) 548-2723, extension 6289. From outside the country, the number is (703) 295-6289. The email address is memapp@ASCE.org. The PDF application may be downloaded at www.ASCE.org/fellows. Completed applications may be submitted online to memapp@ASCE.org. Questions concerning fellow guidelines (including guideline waiver inquiries) or the application process may be directed to the applications coordinator at (703) 295-6389 or memapp@asce.org. Completed applications are reviewed monthly by the Membership Application Review Committee (MARC).