Xiochen Xu, a Ph.D. Student of Civil Engineering at the City College of New York was presented with the 2011 NJDOT Outstanding Student in Transportation Award. Ms. Xu was selected from a pool of potential candidates enrolled at UTRC Consortium schools. Camille Crichon-Sumners, Manager of the Bureau of Research at the New Jersey Department of Transportation presented Xiochen with a plaque at the NJDOT’s 13th Annual Research Showcase held on October 27th at the Mercer County Community College.

Drew Terpenning is a graduate student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He has a multi-disciplinary background combining degrees and work experience in both civil engineering and business/economics. He received his B.A. in International Economics from Drew University in 2007 and worked for Barclays Capital Investments as an operations analyst prior to coming to NJIT. Drew began the program at NJIT in 2009, taking an intensive mix of undergraduate and graduate level civil/environmental engineering courses.

Waqar Azam is a recent graduate with Masters Degree of Science in Civil Engineering from The City College of New York, City University of New York. He worked as a Research Associate with the Region 2, University Transportation Research Center at The City College of New York. and was awarded ?Outstanding University Student in Transportation Award? by NJDOT for his effort on the ?Identification of Traffic Control Measures for Mobile and Short Duration Work Operations? project.

Zhihua Yi is a Ph.D. student at the City College of New York. Mr. Yi’s Ph.D. thesis is on “Blast Loads on Highway Bridges: Mechanisms and Mitigations”. In this work, Mr. Yi has been working on modeling approaches for blast loads and behavior of bridges components during blast loads using highprecision Finite Element Analysis. Mr. Yi has developed a unique approach through which existing software from Department of Defense for blast loading can be used for highway bridges without any modification. In fact, detailed high-precision finite element model of a highway bridge developed by Mr.

Sandeep Mudigonda, received the NJDOT Research Showcase award at the 2006 NJDOT Research Showcase. Sandeep received his undergraduate degree in CEE from IIT Madras in India which is the top Civil Engineering program in India. He joined Rutgers University in 2003 and received his MS degree in the Fall of 2006 under the guidance of Professor Kaan Ozbay. He is currently a first year Ph.D. Student in the CEE program at Rutgers University.

Kemba Walcott received his B.E. (Civil) degree from The City College, CUNY in December 5 2005, and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering at the same institution.

Mr. Liu is currently a Ph.D. student at the City College of New York with Professor Anil K. Agrawal. Prior to joining the City College of New York, Mr. Liu received his M.S. Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. Mr. Liu has been working on the New Jersey Department of Transportation project "Seismic Design Considerations" to develop seismic guidelines for existing bridges on New Jersey. Mr. Liu has a very strong background in solid mechanics and modeling of complex structural systems. For his Ph.D. research, Mr.

I, Yusuf Mehta, Ph.D., have known Mr. Ashish Wadkar for the past year as an Instructor and as a research advisor. Mr. Ashish Wadkar has clearly demonstrated proficiency in the Civil Engineering Materials class, and advanced transportation class that I taught this year. He has spearheaded the effort in the safety research project sponsored by the New Jersey Department of Transportation and pavement research project sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration. He has taken the lead in submitting timely reports and conduct scholarly work.