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Zachary C. Grasley, DOT FAA COE Student of the Year
2006 |
Each year at the
their winter meeting, the Department of
Transportation (DOT) honors the most outstanding student from each participating
University Transportation Center for his/her achievements and promise for future
contributions to the transportation field. Thirty-five students are
selected based on their accomplishments in such areas as technical merit and
research, academic performance, professionalism, and leadership.
This year, continuing the tradition of One DOT, the
Department again honored an awardee from the FAA Air Transportation Centers of Excellence.
We are proud to announce the seventh COE student to be recognized by the DOT,
Zachary C. Grasley. The award was presented to Zachary
by the DOT during the Transportation Research Board (TRB) 85th Annual Meeting in
Washington, DC as part of the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) annual ceremony on Saturday, January 21, 2006.
Zachary will also be recognized as the DOT FAA Center of Excellence (COE)
Outstanding Student of the
Year at the next COE Annual Joint Meeting.
Zachary was nominated by the Center of
Excellence for Airport Technology at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign where he is a doctoral student of Civil Engineering. After
graduating Summa Cum Laude from Michigan Tech in 2001 with a B.S. in Civil
Engineering, he earned his M.S. at UIUC in 2003 and is expected to complete his
Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at UIUC in 2006.
In addition to serving as 2005 President
of the ACI-UIUC Student Chapter, he has received numerous honors, including the
2004 Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Transportation Fellowship, the NSF Travel
Fellowship for 5th International PhD Symposium in Civil Engineering at Delft
Technical University in the Netherlands, and the 2004 Harvey Hagge Concrete
Scholarship at UIUC. In 2002, he was awarded a $20,000 Portland Cement
Association Fellowship for his proposal to develop an internal relative humidity
sensor that could be used in concrete, and this award attested to his enthusiasm
and creative approach to civil engineering materials research.
Currently, Zachary is researching the
behavior of concrete for use in airport pavements and structures. His work has
contributed to the FAA COE project on Moisture Curling of Concrete Slabs for
Airfield Pavements by identifying basic driving forces behind shrinkage of
concrete and measurements of gradients that create curling of slabs.
An outstanding engineer and practitioner,
Zachary has maintained a near perfect grade point average throughout his
academic career and has authored seven archival journal articles, many other
conference and magazine articles, and a book chapter. He has presented his
research at more than 10 national and international conferences. The FAA Centers
of Excellence Program Office is pleased to announce his selection for the
2006 DOT FAA COE Outstanding Student of the Year.
