Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Spring is finally on its way, our students are finishing up their mid-terms, and we’re pleased that our department is continuing to enjoy a successful school year.

In the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, we celebrate a strong, collegial and inclusive community and a place where students unlock their potential and learn critical thinking and practical skills that prepare them for their career. We work hard to support our students and help them be successful in our program and build their path forward. In this newsletter, we feature senior Jennifer Espin. Jennifer “aimed big” during her time at WSU and became an enthusiastic member of our cougar community, taking advantage of many wonderful offerings that helped her find success. We’re so proud to watch students like her launch into what promises to be impactful engineering careers.

We’re pleased that we are growing and expanding to offer civil and environmental engineering programs more widely than ever before. Two online programs will get underway this fall that aim to meet the needs of working engineers and professionals and to provide them with skills to meet society’s needs in infrastructure resilience and environmental sustainability.

This spring we welcome new faculty member, Dr. Haifeng Wang, to the department.  Wang’s group is interested in sensing and machine learning applications for structural engineering, wind engineering and resilience assessment. He joins Dr. Pouria Bahmani and Dr. Jia Li, who joined our faculty last fall. We look forward to new opportunities for collaboration as well as the energy and vibrancy that our new faculty will bring to our program.  We also welcome Annie Hanson, who has joined our program as administrative manager, and Bryce Scofield, a new member of our construction engineering advisory board.

In addition, our researchers continue to find success in winning competitive grants and contracts through agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and US Department of Transportation. I’m excited to share that we have recently received US Department of Transportation support for our Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans) and for a new Tier 1 University Transportation Center focused on environmentally responsible transportation for communities of concern. The PacTrans consortium brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines from computer science to transportation engineering with research focused on improving mobility for people and goods throughout the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Adam Phillips, meanwhile, is leading a $2.6 million US Department of Energy project to design and build carbon-negative homes to combat climate change in the growing residential construction sector. The WSU-led national center TriDurLE also held a highly productive symposium in Hawaii in late 2022. The event brought attendees from around the world to discuss critically important innovations for durability, sustainability, and resilience of transportation infrastructure.

As always, we greatly appreciate the support from our community of friends and donors. Whether serving on advisory boards, providing mentorship and internships to students, or providing donations, your support helps to nurture the next generation of Cougars and change lives. Please feel free to send me a note or drop by if you visit Pullman. And, as always, Go Cougs!

Xianming Shi