News & Events

Kudos to the fourth-year civil engineering capstone team of Sarah Besecky, Glenn Broderick, Katherine Foley, Gabby Ford, Cooper Hamby, Tim Maxwell, Terence Moriarty and Wyatt Yoder on approval of Phase I of their project. The team is working with Engineers in Action, known as EIA, for the design and construction of a pedestrian bridge to serve the communities of Coilolo and Tipa Tipa, located in Coilolo, Jaime Zudáñez, Chuquisaca, Bolivia.The team's Phase 1 final report was presented to Brenton Krieger, Engineers in Action bridge education manager, on Dec. 7.

James A. Smith, Henry L. Kinnier Professor of Civil Engineering, has been elected as a member of the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine, or VASEM. Smith joined the faculty at UVA Engineering in 1992, after earning bachelor's and master's degrees in environmental engineering at Virginia Tech and master's and doctoral degrees in civil engineering at Princeton University, and following seven years as a research hydrologist for the U.S.

Systems engineering Ph.D. student DeAndre Johnson and civil engineering M.S. student Rayshaun Wheeler each won competitive GEM Fellowships to support their UVA Engineering graduate studies in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment.

Avery Walters, a third-year civil engineering major in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been named a John Mather Nobel Scholar. The award is given by the National Space Grant Foundation Inc. and was made possible with funding from the John and Jane Mather Foundation for Science and the Arts. Eligible recipients must be undergraduate or graduate student interns at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Like many college students, Sarah Besecky is spending the summer working as an intern in a field related to her studies — but not all internships attract the attention of local TV and newspaper reporters like this one has.
As a kid, Besecky recently told The (Charlottesville) Daily Progress, she used to wonder how bridges stayed up. As she got older, watching buildings rise from empty lots around her Northern Virginia home turned an early interest in engineering toward an even stronger interest in civil engineering, especially construction.

An environmental advocacy organization founded at the University of Virginia by Linnea Saby, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment, has hired four UVA student interns this summer to work on projects ranging from protecting a native fish species to monitoring the Mountain Valley Pipeline's impact on vulnerable communities.

The Environmental Resilience Institute at UVA's Collaborative Research program, known as CoLabs, is funding a project by Majid Shafiee-Jood, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment, and his partners at UVA's Weldon Cooper Center and Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

Even during a worldwide pandemic, technology makes it possible for four University of Virginia Engineering students to design a footbridge in a Bolivian village — thousands of miles away from Charlottesville. When complete, the footbridge will allow residents of Guayabitos year-round safe passage across a river that floods frequently, cutting off access to services such as health care and schools.

Engineering systems and environment Ph.D. student Prakrut Kansara and his advisor, Professor Venkat Lakshmi, have published a paper in the journal Remote Sensing assessing the impact of the new Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Ethiopia finished construction on the dam, built on the Blue Nile, in July 2020. The Blue Nile flows into the Nile River in Sudan, providing much of the Nile's water volume, before entering Egypt.

Sarah Gustitus-Graham has received an all-University Graduate Teaching Award in recognition of her dedication and outstanding achievement. In the award notification, it was noted that the selection committee “was overwhelmed with the quality and dedication reflected in this year's nominations, and yours was among the top of those submitted.”