CE Department in Outside Publications
July 2009
Professor James Guest featured in Johns Hopkins Engineering Magazine
Guest, along with several other Johns Hopkins researchers, were featured in the Whiting School of Engineering's magazine for his work as a modern prospector of patterns in large amounts of information pertaining to permeability of materials.
Read on Here...
October 2008
Nick Jones named the first to hold the Benjamin T. Rome Deanship
A. James Clark, a leading commercial builder, committed $10 million to endow the deanship in honor of his mentor and business colleague Benjamin T. Rome. The gift provides a permanent stream of unrestricted support that the school's deans — present and future — will be able to invest strategically in faculty, students and programs.
Read on at the JHU Gazette...
September 2008
Professor Robert Dalrymple Featured in Wired's 2008 Smart List
Johns Hopkins Civil Engineering Professor Robert Dalrymple has been named one of the "15 People the Next President Should Listen To" at Wired Magazine. Dalrymple was selected because of his expertise on the damaging effects of hurricanes and tsunamis on infrastructure. Dalrymple offers the next president a three-point plan to prepare for an era of extreme weather.
Read the Article at Wired.com
June 2008
Steel Floor, Buckle no More:
Ying Guan '08, a senior majoring in civil engineering, has developed sophisticated computer predictions to help structural engineers design sturdier and more cost-effective cold-formed steel floors and walls in low-rise buildings. With support from his PURA, Guan performed tests and devised computer models that allow a building designer to test different materials and connections between thin-walled steel beams and the wood panels or drywall used to support them.
Read on at the JHU Gazette...
May 2008
The Gilman Hall Atrium: What If?
When the massive renovation of Gilman Hall is complete, arguably its most dramatic new feature will be a three-story glass-topped central atrium where there is currently an open, unused light well.Inside the atrium, a second-floor courtyard will serve as a bridge between the Hutzler Reading Room and Memorial Hall. This new courtyard will sit atop a first-floor space for the exhibition and study of the university's archaeological collection, which will be showcased behind glass walls.Well, that might be the reality, but that is not quite how 15 senior civil engineering students saw it. They had a few bright ideas of their own about how to rework the space. The students enrolled in Design and Synthesis II, a capstone course for civil engineering majors, had the unique opportunity this spring to combine their structural engineering knowledge with a measure of creative flair to reimagine a main element of the renovation of Homewood's first academic building.
Read on at the JHU Gazette...
January 2008
Expanding Worlds: from the Whiting School of Engineering
As a kid, Blair Johnson ’08 was afraid of
waves. She wasn’t a strong swimmer and the
thought of getting knocked over and rolled into
the undertow filled her with horror. Back then,
she never could have imagined herself as an
undergraduate drawn to coastal engineering; in
fact, she never knew such a discipline existed.
Flash forward 15 years and Johnson found
herself in Granada, Spain, where she passed her
summer studying wave patterns, ports, breakwaters,
and coastal structures.
Here in Baltimore, the civil engineering
major spends much of her time in the basement
of the Stieff Building studying the nature
of waves. In particular, she’s interested in how
waves dissipate over mud, because mud is more
elastic than a harder surface like sand and
absorbs more of the water’s energy.
Read on at WSE Magazine...
January 2008
Dean’s Leadership
Fund: Alumni-
Supported Research
Associate Professor Ben Schafer, in the
Department of Civil Engineering, is using his
Dean’s Leadership funding to conduct research
focused primarily on engineering thin-walled
structures. “As natural resources become scarce,
and society seeks to use a minimum of materials,
engineers are designing structures that are thinwalled
in their construction,” Schafer explains
Read on at WSE Magazine...
August 2007
Obituary: Jack Spangler, 62, Senior Instrument Designer in Whiting School
When William Jack Spangler died at The Johns Hopkins Hospital on Sept. 16, he was 62 years old and had been affiliated with Johns Hopkins for 45 years. "Jack was truly gifted," said Nick Jones, dean of the Whiting School. "He pushed the envelope in his every endeavor." The innovative systems for measurement and control that Spangler built had applications that included particle detectors for high-energy physics experiments and the measurement of field vibrations of large cable-supported bridges.
Jones, a civil engineer, worked with Spangler on numerous bridge-related research projects over the course of more than a dozen years.
Read on at JHU Gazette...
June 2007
Greener Pastures for Ames Hall
On May 8, 2007 students presented a verdant vision for Ames Hall to university leaders,
including Whiting School dean Nick Jones and
Davis Bookhart, Johns Hopkins’ manager of energy
management and environmental stewardship.
The “Ames Hall Green Roof Proposal” is the culmination
of their semester-long senior design project
sponsored jointly by the departments of Civil
Engineering and Geography and Environmental
Engineering (DoGEE).
Read on at WSE Magazine...
June 2007
What's in the Basement?
Surf’s Up! The 20,000-gallon wave tank in the basement of the Stieff Building is equipped
with four hydraulic piston-actuated paddles that can create waves moving at different angles
and frequencies—generating “a fairly realistic sea state,” says Tony Dalrymple, the Willard
and Lillian Hackerman Professor of Civil Engineering. Sensors along the sides of the 58-footlong
tank measure wave height and velocity. Dalrymple and his team develop algorithms to
predict the behavior of waves and their impact on shorelines, then use the tank to field test
their predictions—knowledge vital for preparing for hurricanes, and forecasting how beachfront
construction projects will affect shoreline erosion over the long term.
The pristine waters of the tank (the only one of its design in the nation) will soon
get murkier. This spring, some 7 tons of muddy clay will be deposited over the tank’s bottom
as part of a five-year, multi-university study that Dalrymple will lead.
Read on at WSE Magazine...
June 2007
What does the future
hold for building design
and construction? [Addressed to Professor Benjamin Schafer]
Globalization has influenced the construction
work force and the engineers who
design the buildings. Immigration driven by the
construction market is not just an American
issue. My friends who are engineers sitting
in offices in New York City are often designing
buildings in Hong Kong. Just as
common today is an engineer in India
working on the design of a building
in Chicago or Baltimore. For us here
at Hopkins, this means we are beginning
to train our students differently,
with increased emphasis on flexibility,
creativity, and, yes, in some cases, soft skills.
Read on at WSE Magazine
November 2006
New All-Time Weight Record Set at 13th Annual Spaghetti Bridge Competition
How much weight do you think a bridge made only of spaghetti and glue can hold? Did we mention that the bridge itself weighs no more than one pound, 10.5 ounces? On Sunday, November 5, students enrolled in the freshman course, “What is Engineering?” found out during the Whiting School’s 13th annual Spaghetti Bridge Competition. Tacoma Narrows, built by Ellen Berlinghof, Rory O’Rourke, and Graham Belton, took the $100 grand prize with a bridge that held 147 pounds!
Read on at Connections Alumni Magazine...
April 2006
Katherine Acton: A Composition of Many Talents
Classical piano...math...creative writing, and now functionally graded materials. For doctoral student Katherine Acton, life has many layers.
Read on at WSE Magazine...
April 2006
Force of Nature:
When Robert Anthony Dalrymple watches the surf, he sees the approaching swell, the foaming curl, the cascade of water, the sea sliding up the beach toward his feet. He's no less mesmerized than the rest of us. But where most people look at plunging surf and see chaos, he sees structure, eddies and vortices, wave forms and fluid mechanics. "I see things I can predict," he says, "and things I can't predict." He smiles and adds, "I can be very boring at the beach. My wife doesn't enjoy going with me anymore. She makes me go to the mountains now on vacation."
Read on at JHU Magazine...
February 2006
Two Professors Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
Two Johns Hopkins faculty members — one with expertise in coastal engineering and the other in speech recognition technology — have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering.
Read on at the JHU Gazette...
September 2005
What Are the Chances That a New Composite Building Material Will Crumble?
We may look at a building and perceive solid slabs of concrete, but Lori Graham-Brady is seeing something else. She’s weighing the possibility of it cracking and failing. Just how many of our modern buildings possess this element of risk? According to the associate professor in the Whiting School’s Department of Civil Engineering, all of them do, though most thankfully in very small degrees. “Everybody knows that risk is there when you build a building,”
Read on at the WSE Magazine...
February 2005
Post-Tsunami Thailand Yields Lessons for Coastal Construction Engineering: Experts See How Buildings and Materials Fared Against Walls of Water
An inspection of Thai villages and ports struck by tsunami waves has uncovered some engineering lessons that might reduce casualties and destruction in future oceanic upheavals, a Johns Hopkins researcher said.
Read on at JHU News...
February 2005
Bridge Engineering and Art
To most people, a bridge is simply an assembly that allows travelers to move safely across a river or some other expanse. But to senior Christina Terpeluk, a bridge can be a piece of structural art. To qualify, it must be a work of elegance and efficiency that showcases its designer's engineering goals in a way that appeals to the eye.
Supported by a PURA, Terpeluk has spent months studying 19th-century American iron truss bridges, trying to determine whether they fit the definition of structural art, a concept championed by David P. Billington, a civil engineering scholar at Princeton. For her project, Terpeluk has conducted detailed studies of three types of truss bridges built more than a century ago.
Read on at the JHU Gazette...
2004
Civil Engineering Senior Named Mitchell Scholar
John Hanley passed away almost ten years ago of cancer, but his son hasn't forgotten his heritage: Next fall, Hanley will go back to Ireland as a recipient of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship, an award given annually by the U.S.-Ireland Alliance to 12 students for a year of graduate study at universities in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Hanley, who has been a civil engineering major since he first stepped on campus, grew up fascinated by buildings.
Read on at the JHU Newsletter...
2004
Nick Jones Named as New Dean
Jones first arrived here in 1986 as a brand-new Ph.D., rising through the ranks from assistant professor to professor and then chair of the Department of Civil Engineering, a position he left in 2002."Having spent 16 years at Hopkins, it has been a big part of my professional life," Jones said last week. "After I left, I would come back to visit, and I realized even more clearly what a special place this institution is."
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