News & archives

MAY 2017. The PCI Big Beam team has completed their work for the PCI Big Beam competition.  Check out the video of  team “Big Beam and Robin” on YouTube.

APRIL 2017. Kudos to the following CENE majors:

• Sabrina Ballard (CE) was awarded the CEFNS Outstanding Senior at graduation this spring.
• Yijie Gao (CE) and Aide Robles (CE) received the NAU Gold Axe Award in recognition of their being outstanding members of the academic community.
• Ziyan Wu (CE) has received funding through a Hooper Undergraduate Research Award for 2017-2018 to support her project “Development and Update of Rainfall and Runoff Intensity-Duration-Frequency Curves for Arizona State Counties in Response to Climate Change”. Her project mentor is Dr. Amin Mohebbi.

Sabrina Ballard and Dr. Robin Tuchscherer

Yijie Gao and Dr. Jun Ho

MARCH 2017. CENE Capstone in the news! A team of CENE seniors worked with the City of Jerome on a parking project. The CENE seniors were Bethany Kieffer, Hashim Sabyah, Saud Al Dandan and Cristian Tafoya.

FEB 2017. Clayton Freed, Chair of the Young Professionals Committee at the Arizona Water Association brought a group up to NAU-CENE to investigate starting a Student Chapter of the American Water Works Association (AWWA) and the Water Environment Federation (WEF). Interest was high among environmental and civil engineering majors interested in water resources.  We are moving forward with creating this student chapter, under the advisement of Dr. Amin Mohebbi.

JAN 2017. At the 2017 Arizona Water Association Research Committee’s Building Our Sustainable Water Future Conference, (January 10) NAU environmental engineering graduate (Dec 2016) Danial Monar’s poster, “Sustainable Agriculture Design Project: Aquaponics,” received the 3rd place poster award. He was the only non-ASU/UA poster presenter 🙂 Congrats Daniel!!

JAN 2017. Dr. Ed Smaglik, along with Drs. Jun Ho, Brendan Russo and Amin Mohebbi are part of a multi-university ABOR-RIF project that is focused on improving traffic flow on the I-10.

JAN 2017. Dr. Jun Ho visited the Hunan Institute of Technology (HIT) located in Hengyang, China during the winter break. Jun and his host faculty, Dr. Junxin Huang, were interviewed by Hengyang TV for their collaboration resulting in a second place award received in the Student Poster Competition of the 2016 Arizona Pavements/Materials Conference. Dr. Huang was a visiting scholar at NAU in the spring of 2016 and they supervised two NAU CE seniors on a research project with a focus on dust control technology. The entire interview is in Chinese and it is available to view for those interested.

DEC 2016. Graduating civil engineering major Christian Tafoya was recognized at the CEFNS Ceremony as an Outstanding Graduating Senior. From California, Christian will be working for ADOT in Phoenix designing intelligent transportation systems. In the photo, Christian (left) is with sponsoring faculty member Brendan Russo.

NOV 2016. CECMEE Surveying Lab Instructor Erick Welch was on the job this week, and spotted one of Flagstaff’s finest species. An American Bald Eagle.

OCT 2016. CE students participated in the 2016 Arizona Pavements/Materials Student Poster Competition on 11/16/2016 and received awards:

• First Overall Place award (against all graduate/undergraduate students): Cristina Martin Linares (CE, MSE). Project Title: Modeling freeze-thaw cycles of asphalt mixtures
• Second place award (undergraduate category): Yijie Gao and Yuzhi Zhang (CE seniors). Project title: Mechanical responses of polymer dust suppressant mixed with soils in Northern Arizona
• Third place award (undergraduate category): Anas Almonnieay, Khin Kyaw, Phoo Myat Sandy Maung (CE seniors). Project title: Optimizing the use of recycle glass in concrete (CENE 486 Capstone project)

from left: Cristina Martin; Dr. Jun Ho; Phoo Myat Sandy Maung; Anas Almonnieay; Khin Kyaw; Yijie Gao; Amal Abdelaziz; and Yuzhi Zhang

OCT 2016. Civil engineering senior Cristian Tafoya was selected for the NAU Gold Axe Award. This award is given to students who demonstrate an extraordinary amount of commitment to their studies, their academic department and the university as a whole, with above average GPAs and a high level of community involvement and public service.  Cristian was also selected as the College’s Outstanding Senior graduating this fall.

SEP 2016. The annual AzSCE conference took place on Friday September 9th, 2016 at the Desert Willow conference center in Phoenix. At this conference, 20 students from NAU, U of A, and ASU participated in a student research poster competition. The posters were judged by professional civil engineers attending the conference. NAU senior civil engineering student Sabrina Ballard won the poster presentation by presenting her research poster entitled “Use of Photogrammetry to Assess the Condition of Existing Structures”. This research was supervised by Dr. Robin Tuchscherer. Sabrina has an internship with Hubbard Merrell Engineering in Flagstaff.

Students experimenting with pressure drop in the new CENE 333L.