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Awards and accolades


May 23, 2022

Shahryar Ahmad

Shahryar Ahmad (Ph.D. ‘21), a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), was featured in the Early Career Scientist Spotlight showcasing the research highlights, science motivations, and achievements of the early career scientist community at Goddard. Read more

Milad Ashtiani

Milad Ashtiani, Ph.D. student, is the recipient of the 2022 College of Engineering Student Teaching Award for his continuous commitment to teaching the lab component of the Construction Materials course for more than 10 consecutive quarters, three of which occurred in an innovative virtual setting during the pandemic.

Nishan Kumar Biswas

Nishan Kumar Biswas (Ph.D. ’21) had his career journey highlighted in a NASA Early Career Scientist Spotlight. They usually feature early career scientists for their work in the field relevant to NASA’s research facility. Nishan was highlighted because of his work focused on the application of satellite remote sensing in the field of water resources and hydroclimatic disasters. Read more

Quinn Brencher

Quinn Brencher Ph.D. student, received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This fellowship will support Quinn’s research applying a fusion of high-resolution satellite data to understand and quantify changing glacial landscapes, natural hazards, and water resources in High Mountain Asia, Earth’s ‘third pole.’

Zhiyong Cui

Zhiyong Cui (Ph.D. ‘21), is the recipient of the Best Dissertation Award from the AED50 Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Applications Committee of Transportation Research Board. His research focuses on intelligent transportation systems, deep learning, urban computing, traffic forecasting, and traffic control. The title of his dissertation is “deep learning for short-term network-wide road traffic forecasting.”

Alex Horner-Devine

Alex Horner-Devine, Professor, was honored with a UW 2022 Faculty Appreciation for Career Education & Training (FACET) award after being nominated by UW Engineering students. The award recognizes Horner-Devine’s impact on students’ professional development through mentorship and career preparation.

Michael Gomez

Michael Gomez, Assistant Professor, was honored with a UW 2022 Faculty Appreciation for Career Education & Training (FACET) award after being nominated by UW Engineering students. The award recognizes Gomez’s impact on students’ professional development through mentorship and career preparation.

Qiangqiang Guo

Qiangqiang Guo, Ph.D. student, received first place in the Student Research Competition on Artificial Intelligence Enabled Next Generation Transportation System, organized by the Artificial Intelligence in Transportation Committee, ASCE Transportation & Development Institute. His research interests include dynamic transportation network modeling/control and connected/automated vehicles.

Jessica Kaminsky

Jessica Kaminsky, Associate Professor, was honored with a UW 2022 Faculty Appreciation for Career Education & Training (FACET) award after being nominated by UW Engineering students. The award recognizes Kaminsky’s impact on students’ professional development through mentorship and career preparation.

Ruimin Ke

Ruimin Ke, (Ph.D. ’20) currently an assistant professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, is the recipient of the Best Dissertation Award 2020-2021 presented by the Chinese Overseas Transportation Association (COTA). He completed his dissertation titled "Real-time video analytics empowered by machine learning and edge computing for smart transportation application" under the supervision of Dr. Yinhai Wang.

Cole Kopca

Cole Kopca, Ph.D. student, is the recipient of Outstanding Younger Member Award from Transportation and Development Institute (T&DI) of American Society of Civil Engineers, in recognition of his professional contributions to the Committee on Younger Members, the Institute, and the Society.

Dawn Lehman

Dawn Lehman, Professor, contributed to the Miami Herald's investigative reporting that led to the news team being honored with the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting. The award honors the media team’s investigation into the partial collapse of Champlain Towers South, for which Lehman provided expert commentary and technical insight following the June 2021 collapse of the 12-story beachfront condominium in Surfside, Florida.

Jessica Lundquist

Jessica Lundquist, Professor, was honored with a UW 2022 Faculty Appreciation for Career Education & Training (FACET) award after being nominated by UW Engineering students. The award recognizes Lundquist’s impact on students’ professional development through mentorship and career preparation.

Brett Maurer

Brett Maurer, Assistant Professor, has been awarded the 2022 Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Geo-Institute. The award recognizes Maurer’s accomplishments in teaching and research in geotechnical earthquake engineering. The overarching theme of Maurer’s research is developing models and software to study soil liquefaction, which can cause major damage during earthquakes when soil beneath buildings behaves like a liquid.

Alex Mellor

Alex Mellor is the recipient of the Lamberson Memorial Scholarship, awarded by the Beavers Charitable Trust. The scholarship supports her pursuit of a double degree in Civil Engineering, with a focus in construction, and Drama Design focusing on costume design. She will return next year to complete her degrees and is interning this summer with WG Clark, a Seattle construction company.

Steve Muench

Steve Muench, Professor, has been selected to receive the 2022 College of Engineering Faculty Teaching Award. According to Dean Nancy Allbritton, Muench was selected for his ”exceptional work as a teacher and mentor, as well as curriculum development and departmental service.” Muench serves as the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education and also directs two of the department’s study abroad programs.

Rebecca Neumann

Rebecca Neumann, Associate Professor, has been selected by the American Geophysical Union to be an ambassador in the inaugural cohort of Local Science Partners. She was selected for her leadership ability and potential to positively impact the local science policy landscape. The Local Science Partners program is designed to facilitate partnerships between ambassadors and policymakers to help encourage science-based decision making. The program includes travel to Washington, D.C., for a congressional visit day in the spring.

Ryan Rasanen

Ryan Rasanen, Ph.D. student, received second place at the 2022 ASCE Geo-Congress National Poster Competition in Charlotte, NC for his poster “Probabilistic Seismic Source Inversion Via Inverse-Analysis of Co-Seismic Landslide Evidence.” His poster summarizes a novel inversion framework that can be used to determine the magnitude and location of ancient earthquakes from their co-seismic landslide evidence.

Jessica Ray

Jessica Ray, Assistant Professor, is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program Award, which supports early career faculty who have the potential to lead notable advances in research and education. The award supports Ray’s work to design novel, low-cost composite materials to selectively remove and/or degrade toxic contaminants in water sources.

Nathalie Thelemaque

Nathalie Thelemaque, Ph.D. Student, is the recipient of the 2022 Outstanding Woman in DEI Advocacy award from the UW Society of Women Engineers. This award commemorates her various outreach initiatives at the university and elsewhere that are centered on improving diversity in STEM and other fields.

Joe Wartman

Joe Wartman, Professor, has been selected by the American Geophysical Union to be an ambassador in the inaugural cohort of Local Science Partners. He was selected for his leadership ability and potential to positively impact the local science policy landscape. The Local Science Partners program is designed to facilitate partnerships between ambassadors and policymakers to help encourage science-based decision making. The program includes travel to Washington, D.C., for a congressional visit day in the spring.

Hao Frank Yang

Hao Frank Yang, Ph.D. student, was the first place winner in the Small Town Bridge category of the ASCE Bridge Photo Contest. Yang is a researcher in the Smart Transportation Research and Application Lab (STAR Lab). His research interests are focused on connected and smart infrastructure, cyber-physical system, traffic sensing and operation and deep learning.

Julian Yamaura

Julian Yamaura, Assistant Teaching Professor, was honored with a UW 2022 Faculty Appreciation for Career Education & Training (FACET) award after being nominated by UW Engineering students. The award recognizes Yamaura’s impact on students’ professional development through mentorship and career preparation.

Shuyi Yin

Shuyi Yin, a Ph.D. student in Transportation Engineering, led a team of five who placed second in the Transportation Forecasting Competition (TRANSFOR22). They proposed an innovative data pipeline that utilizes time series clustering and various supervised learning techniques to subclassify high-risk pedestrians at intersections and to predict their street-crossing time. Their solution, together with advanced traffic sensing, would facilitate more proactive protection of pedestrians at intersections.

Peter Yu

Peter Yu, an undergraduate student who is a member of the UW STAR Lab, received the Best Student Paper Award from the Western District of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE Western District). Yu is the first individual under 20 years old and one of only several undergraduate students to have received this award since its establishment in 1979. The purpose of the award is to encourage student members to conduct and report on independent and original research and investigation of transportation subjects.

Meixin Zhu

Meixin Zhu, Ph.D. student, won second place in the American Statistical Association Transportation Statistics Interest Group Student Paper Competition. The paper aims to model the long-term microscopic car-following behavior of drivers. An encoder-decoder architecture-based car-following model with Transformer blocks as the backbone was proposed. Based on real-world car-following events, they demonstrated that the model has superior performance on long-sequence car-following trajectory prediction, outperforming traditional car-following models and some recent data-driven models.

Purple and gold ballons

Sixteen undergraduate students received scholarships of $2,000 each from the Washington Asphalt Pavement Association. The funds for the UW scholarships are provided by local paving contractors and their suppliers.

  • Ahmad Nasry
  • Alex Escobar-Moreno
  • Andrew Kuropyatnick
  • Brian Choi
  • Brian Zabala
  • Caroline Wigner
  • Chloe Jackson
  • Dellen Behrend
  • Erik Carranza Herrera
  • Jannah Bongato
  • Kamille Matunan
  • Lilly Burnett
  • Mohammad Asakreh
  • Trent Wydrowski
  • Xinyi Qian
  • Yusur Aldhahi