Students compete virtually for spots in School of Engineering poster competition

By Peter Murphy

“Students presented virtually this year,” says Joseph F. Atkinson, professor and Department chair. “Each student had ten minutes to present to faculty judges and spectators. It was challenging to present that much information in a short amount of time, but our students impressed.”

Mohammad Syed, a PhD candidate in structural engineering took first prize this year, presenting his research Tessellated Structural-Architectural Systems for Rapid Construction, Repair and Disassembly.

“This poster introduces a new modular shear wall system designed for replaceability and resilience after extreme loading, as well as architectural appeal,” says Syed, who is co-advised by associate professors Negar Elhami-Khorasani and Pinar Okumus. “The walls are called tessellated structural-architectural walls because they consist of interlocking tiles with repetitive shapes. They satisfy both structural and architectural demands.”

Syed will be presenting this work at The American Society of Civil Engineers Structural Engineering Institute’s structures congress this spring and earned the 2021 Structural Engineers Foundation graduate scholarship for his research.

Hamed Khorasani earned second place for his poster Evaluating the Hypotheses of the Steady-state Phosphorus Models for Lakes. Advised by Zhenduo Zhu, Khorasani is a PhD candidate in environmental and water resources engineering.

“Dr. Zhu initially suggested a classical problem to me to work on for an individual study,” Khorasani says. “Usually researchers avoid these problems, as they are believed to already be solved, but we took on the challenge, and our top-performing model was developed and tested for the first time in lake studies.”

Khorasani also earned the student choice award, selected by student attendees as their favorite poster. Khorasani also took second prize in last week's Three-Minute Thesis competition. 

Mi Jin Jung, a structural engineering candidate took third place with a presentation on Flexural behavior of prestressed girders with bonded and unbonded strands.

According to Jung, this work will have a significant impact.

“The results of my work will lead to changes in the design specifications from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and the American Concrete Institute,” Jung, advised by Okumus, says. “These features enable bridges that are sustainable, resilient, architecturally pleasing and structurally efficient. We developed multi-scale analytical models varying in their level of complexity in order to accurately simulate the load-deflection, failure modes and stress and strain distribution.”

Syed and Khorasani will represent the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences graduate poster competition, where a winner will be announced on March 8.