Academics

Civil and environmental engineering announces tenure for five faculty members

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Five Penn State Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty members have been selected for promotion and/or tenure, effective July 1, 2019.

Christopher Gorski has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Gorski has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 2012. He holds a bachelor of science degree in civil and environmental engineering from Purdue University and a doctorate in environmental engineering from the University of Iowa. He also did post-doctoral research in environmental chemistry at Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. His research interests include environmental redox chemistry, aquatic geochemistry, environmental electrochemistry, environmental mineralogy, salinity gradient energy, capacitive mixing, mineral transformation reactions, contaminant fate in groundwater systems, the role of minerals in organic carbon cycling and hydraulic fracturing. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2018).

Xiaofeng Liu has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Liu has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 2014. He holds a bachelor of science degree in hydraulic engineering from Tsinghua University, a master of science degree in environmental science from Peking University, a master of science degree in applied math from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While at Penn State, Liu briefly worked with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers as a civil engineer through an Intergovernmental Personnel Act agreement. His research interests include environmental hydraulics, sediment transport, and computational model development and application. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering. He also serves as the chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers Computational Fluid Dynamics Task Committee.

Aleksandra Radlińska has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Radlińska has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 2012. She holds a bachelor of science degree and a master of science degree in civil engineering from the Szczecin University of Technology and a doctorate in civil engineering from Purdue University. Her research focuses on extraterrestrial construction, longevity of concrete infrastructure and reactive aggregates. She is an American Concrete Institute (ACI) Fellow, won the 2015 Walter P. Moore, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award (ACI), the Best Paper Award at the 3rd International Conference on Sustainable Construction Materials and Technologies (2013) and the ACI Young Member Award for Professional Achievement (2012). She has participated in NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge where the Penn State team placed second (2019). Currently, she is the adviser for the ACI and ASCE student chapters, chair of the ACI Concrete Research Council, editor for the Journal on Construction and Building Materials and associate editor for the ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering.

Chaopeng Shen has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Shen has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 2012. He holds a bachelor of science degree in environmental engineering from Sichuan University and a doctorate in environmental engineering from Michigan State University. He also completed post-doctoral research in computational geophysics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research interests include big data machine learning in hydrology, coupling between hydrology and ecosystems, flood and drought predictions, rainfall-induced landslides and floodplain systems. He is the associate editor for Water Resources Research, a journal on hydrology, water resources and the social sciences of water; associate editor for Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: AI in Food, Agriculture and Water; and the principal investigator on Penn State’s project for the Google AI Impacts Challenge.

Ming Xiao has received tenure as an associate professor. Xiao has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 2013. He holds a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering from Shandong University, a master of science in civil engineering from Zhejiang University, a master of science in computer science from Kansas State University, and a doctorate in civil engineering from Kansas State University. Prior to coming to Penn State, Xiao was an associate professor at California State University, Fresno. His research interests include performances of civil infrastructures and permafrost coastal erosion due to permafrost degradation in the Arctic and their sociodemographic impacts; performances of the built environment and infrastructure (such as subgrade and coastal infrastructures, levees and geosynthetically-reinforced bridge abutments) under in-service conditions and extreme events (such as earthquakes, hurricanes and flooding) and seepage and erosion. He received the Harry West Teaching Award (2019) and was named a Distinguished Honors Faculty of the Penn State Schreyer Honors College (2018). He is the chair of the 10th International Conference on Scour and Erosion in 2020 in D.C.

Last Updated June 20, 2019

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