7:57 a.m., Sept. 23, 2009----Harry (Tripp) Shenton and Sue McNeil, professors in the University of Delaware's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, have received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education to support Ph.D. students working in the area of transportation infrastructure engineering.

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Awarded through the DOE's Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) program, the grant, which totals $650,000 over three years including UD matching funds, will provide tuition and stipend fellowships for six doctoral-level students.

“The deteriorating condition of our nation's transportation infrastructure is well known,” says Shenton. “Almost daily, we hear stories of congested highways, pothole-riddled roads, crumbling bridges, and delayed commuter trains due to poor track conditions. We need to educate a new generation of engineers who will serve as the stewards of these assets, as well as academics who will train these stewards.”

The program will encompass a broad range of fields from structural, transportation, and geotechnical engineering to risk and reliability, planning and public policy, asset management, and sustainability. The societal impact of engineering will also be integrated into the program.

“It's critical that the next generation of academics and engineers be trained to address infrastructure problems from the viewpoint of the entire system,” McNeil says. “Historically, individual elements of our transportation infrastructure have been designed with little regard for their relation to other elements of the system. Our goal is to educate and train future academics with the skills and experience needed to approach this problem through an integrated system-level perspective that transcends the discipline-specific topics addressed in the traditional curriculum.”

Shenton and McNeil will also make a concerted effort to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in engineering, including women as well as racial minorities, as they recruit students for the program.

“The future diversity of the engineering profession is critical to its success,” Shenton says. “To fulfill the growing demand for engineers, it's essential that we attract students from traditionally underrepresented groups, and to do that, we need to have faculty role models for those students. The GAANN fellowships will target graduate students from those groups, with the goal of ultimately increasing the diversity of engineering faculty.”

UD was one of six schools to receive a grant in engineering; other awards were made in the areas of biology, chemistry, computer and information sciences, mathematics, nursing, and physics.

Article by Diane Kukich
Photo by Doug Baker