Dear CEE Community and Friends,

I hope everyone has enjoyed the last few weeks of summer before fall semester begins.

In this month’s newsletter, we celebrate four faculty members, Jesse Kroll, David Simchi-Levi, Franz Josef-Ulm, and Gioele Zardini, on receiving endowed professorship appointments. We share a blog post written by Anika H. '26, detailing her experience traveling to Italy for course (3.094) Materials In the Human Experience. The Carstensen Group co-led a K-12 outreach event focused on structural engineering, while the Howland Lab participated in an outreach event that educated young students on wind energy. We congratulate graduate student Jevan Yu, who received a NASA FINESST Fellowship, and Prof. Jesse Kroll, who was awarded a Spark Climate grant. Lastly, we highlight new research from the Howland Lab that could improve the design and operation of wind farms and new faculty member, Assistant Prof. Gioele Zardini.

Sincerely,

Ali Jadbabaie

JR East Professor

Department Head, MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering

Core Faculty, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

We are pleased to announce that Professors Jesse Kroll, David Simchi-Levi, and Franz Josef-Ulm have been appointed to endowed chairs, and incoming Assistant Prof. Gioele Zardini has been appointed to the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Career Development professorship.

Carstensen Group co-leads K-12 outreach event

Graduate student, Hajin Kim-Tackowiak of the Carstensen Group along with Amy Fitzgerald of the MIT Edgerton Center co-led a design challenge exercise for middle schoolers participating in the GE Girls @MIT summer program. The Carstensen Group worked with the Edgerton Center to develop a new design module to show the creativity involved in the civil engineering discipline. The girls designed a floating device to get the family car from point A to point B in response to sea level rise.

Howland Lab partners with Vineyard Wind for K-12 outreach event

The Howland Lab partnered with Vineyard Wind, a company building offshore wind energy off the coast of Massachusetts, for an outreach event near their headquarters in New Bedford. The community event helped educate local residents and young people to the opportunities of offshore wind energy.

Research in Pompeii

Anika H. '26 shares her experience visiting Italy to conduct research on Roman concrete for (3.094) Materials In the Human Experience with Prof. Admir Masic for the MIT Admissions Blog.

CEE graduate student awarded NASA fellowship

Jevan Yu was among those selected from a competitive pool of applicants to receive the 3-year Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) Fellowship to support his research on wildfires in peatlands.

Prof. Jesse Kroll awarded Spark Climate grant for atmospheric methane research

Prof. Kroll’s research will explore the potential for chlorinated compounds to serve as markers to quantify existing atmospheric methane oxidation pathways. This work could lead to a transformational new approach to improve our understanding of atmospheric processes that breakdown methane and other pollutants.

Postdoc Jaime Liew, doctoral student Kirby Heck, and Prof. Michael Howland have developed a comprehensive model that accurately represents the airflow around wind turbine rotors even under extreme conditions, such as when the blades are operating at high forces and speeds, or are angled in certain directions. This new model could improve the way turbine blades and wind farms are designed and how wind turbines are controlled.

Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Gioele Zardini joins CEE from Stanford University, where he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His research focuses on addressing the design challenges of complex systems, and he will be teaching 1.S980: Applied Category Theory for Engineering Design this fall.

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