CivMin faculty and students garner CSCE recognition

CivMin professors and students honoured by CSCE: (top row L to R) Prof. Khander Habib, Prof. Doug Hooton, Prof. Jeffrey Packer with (bottom row L to R) graduate research students Jens Kuhn and YuJing Fan, and Prof. Frank Vecchio.

The Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE) announced its 2020 Honours, Awards and Fellowships, recognizing several CivMin faculty and students.

Among those recognized by the CSCE are Prof. Khander Habib, Prof.Doug Hooton, Prof. Jeffrey Packer, along with graduate students Jens Kuhn and YuJing Fan (CivE MASc 1T7), and Prof. Frank Vecchio.

Sandford Fleming Award
Prof. Khander Habib presented the Sandford Fleming Award for 2020. The award is presented annually to a member of the CSCE who has made particularly outstanding contributions to the development and practice of transportation engineering in Canada.

Habib has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 2010. Habib received his BSc. (2000) and MSc. (2002) degrees in Civil Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology. He received his Ph.D. (2007) from the University of Toronto. Before joining the University of Toronto, he served as a Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering of the University of Alberta (2007-2010). Habib received several awards including Eric Pass Award (Honorable mention) from the International Association of Travel Behaviour Research; Early Researcher Award from Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation; Minister’s Award for (transportation) Process Innovation from Alberta Ministry ofTransportation; Pyke Johnson Award and numerous best paper awards as well as certificates of appreciation from theTransportation Research Board (TRB) of US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine; Educational Achievement Award from the Transportation Association of Canada, Trottier Fellowship at the Institut de Energie Trottier in Montreal; Dean’s Merit Pool awards and Percy Edward Hart Professorship from the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University ofToronto. He serves editorial boards of several top-tire transportation journals and works as an editor of two journals. He is a member of TRB’s standing committees on transportation demand forecasting and travel behaviour analysis.

Areas of Expertise: Strategic transportation planning, travel demand modelling, travel survey methods, transport economics, transport policy, econometric choice modelling, emerging transportation technologies, and smart cities in the era of automated and transformative transportation (on-demand mobility, ride-sourcing and sharing economy).

 

Fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering
Prof. Doug Hooton is recognized as a Fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering 2020.

Robert Douglas Hooton is a Professor in the University ofToronto’s Department of Civil Engineering and holds the NSERC/ Cement Association of Canada Senior Industrial Research Chair in Concrete Durability and Sustainability. He received his BASc (1974) and MASc (1975) from University of Toronto and PhD (1981) from McMaster University. Dr. Hooton is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario and in addition to being a member of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers, he is a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He is an Honorary member of the American Concrete Institute (ACI), and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Concrete Technology (UK), Fellow of RILEM, Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, and Fellow of ASTM.

He received the Engineering Institute of Canada’s Julian C. Smith Medal (2016), the Ontario Professional Engineers Medal for Research and Development (2012), ACI’s Wason Research Medal (2014), as well as ACI’s R.E. Philleo (2013), and A.R. Anderson (2011) awards, and the CSA Award of Merit (1997). Well known as an expert on both Cementitious Materials and Concrete Durability, he has been active on over 40 standards, technical, and code committees in North America and Europe, holding a number of leadership positions on these committees. Several new standard test methods and building code changes related to concrete durability in Canada and the U.S.A. have been developed or championed by him based on the results of his research.

 

Casimir Gzowski Medal
Prof. Jeffrey Packer, with students Jens Kuhn and YuJing Fan, are awarded The Casimir Gzowski Medal for 2020 for their paper on Rectangular hollow section webs under transverse compression (cjce-2018-0485). Established by Sir Casimir in 1890, the Casimir Gzowski Medal is awarded annually for the best civil engineering paper in surveying, structural engineering or heavy construction.

Abstract: An investigation is presented into full-width, RHS X-connections subject to transverse compression, including the effect of a compressive or tensile chord preload. A re-evaluation of world-wide experimental tests on fullwidth X-connections revealed considerable inaccuracy with current design recommendations, as well as significant discrepancies between them. A finite element study was hence conducted to further investigate the behaviour of such connections. A critical value of the bearing length-to-chord height ratio was found, where yielding failure of the chord webs turns into buckling failure, and this has been implemented in the subsequent design recommendation. e proposed design procedure is based on 350 finite element results, covering a wide range of chord sidewall slenderness values, bearing length values and chord stress ratios, as well as against a screened data base of 125 experimental tests. The proposal is shown to offer excellent predictions and incorporates a simple reliability analysis.

 

A.B. Sanderson Award
Prof. Frank Vecchio, is presented the A.B. Sanderson Award for 2020. The award is presented to a member of the CSCE who has made particularly outstanding contributions to the development and practice of structural engineering in Canada.

Frank J. Vecchio, Ph.D., P.Eng., is Professor and Bahen/Tanenbaum Chair in Civil Engineering in the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering at the University ofToronto. He has been on Faculty since 1985. Dr. Vecchio received his doctorate from the University of Toronto (1981), where he also received his B.A.Sc. (1978) and M.Eng. (1979) degrees. Prior to joining the Faculty at the University ofToronto, he was employed as a research engineer at Ontario Hydro (1981-1985). He is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario. His research interests relate to the development of improved analysis procedures for reinforced concrete structures, particularly for those that are shear-sensitive. Recent activities include the development of improved constitutive models and nonlinear finite element procedures, application to the assessment and forensic analysis of concrete structures, and analysis of damaged, repaired or rehabilitated structures. Additional interests include the modelling and assessment of fibre reinforced concrete (FRC) structures, structures rehabilitated with fibre reinforced polymers (FRP), and structures subjected to extreme loads including blast, impact, fire and earthquake. He is the author of over 120 technical papers in these areas.

Dr. Vecchio is a Fellow of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers (CSCE) and former recipient of the CSCE Whitman-Wright Award (2011) and Horst Leipholz Medal (2014), and the Ontario Professional Engineers Engineering Medal – Research and Development (2014). He continues to be an active member of several international technical societies and committees relating to the design and assessment of reinforced concrete structures.

 

From the CSCE’s 2020 Honours, Awards and Fellowships