Dr. Carlson leads Colorado Water Watch study to chart changes in groundwater

Conducted through Colorado State University in partnership with Noble Energy, the Colorado Water Watch demonstration project will soon begin water table monitoring in test wells at roughly 10 Noble production sites in a real-time look at how the water changes.

"It was conceived not so much as a research project but as a tool to provide information to the public," said project lead researcher Ken Carlson, an associate professor Civil and Environmental Engineering at CSU. "The oil and gas industry is taking the initiative here to provide some visibility."

To read the full story, click here.

Department Awarded Funding for New Water Center

Mazdak Arabi, PI, Brian Bledsoe, Co-PI, Sybil Sharvelle, Co-PI, and Neil Grigg, Director were awarded a multi-university grant for a new water center:

The Mission of the CLEAN center is to create knowledge, build capacity, and forge collaboration to develop and demonstrate sustainable solutions for reduction of nutrient pollution in the nation's water resources.

The Center activities connect natural and physical systems, human actions, and policy to create innovative solutions to nutrient pollution problems. Sustainable nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) management solutions for restoring watershed systems and attaining designated uses will be developed and demonstrated. These sustainable solutions will integrate abatement strategies for urban, agricultural, and riparian systems, and effective policy instruments (incentives and market-based approaches) that facilitate trading among sectors, provide equity along water systems, increase chance of adoption, and minimize costs.

New Faculty in Civil & Environmental Engineering

The Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering is excited to welcome three new faculty members: Dr. Michael Gooseff, Dr. Bruce Ellingwood and Dr. Ryan Bailey. Each brings with them a diverse set of expertise to our already strong team of professors and researchers. We expect great things from each of them and look forward to their many contributions in the years to come.

	Dr. Michael Gooseff joined the faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an Associate Professor in July 2013. He was previously an Associate Professor at Penn State University. His research interests are focused on understanding how physical hydrological processes influence ecosystems and vice versa, mostly in the context of stream-groundwater systems. He earned is PhD from the University of Colorado in 2001.
	Dr. Bruce Ellingwood, Professor, comes to the Department as a Special Faculty in the Structures program. He received his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He held professional research and administrative positions at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), Johns Hopkins University and Georgia Institute of Technology prior to joining Colorado State University. Read More... His main research and professional interests involve the application of probability and statistics to structural engineering, particularly in structural reliability theory and probabilistic risk assessment. He is internationally recognized as an authority on structural load modeling, reliability and risk analysis of engineered facilities, and as a leader in the technical development and implementation of probability based codified design standards for building structures. He is Editor of Structural Safety, and serves on six other editorial boards. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Distinguished Member of ASCE.
	Dr. Ryan Bailey joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an Assistant Professor in August 2013. Ryan's research focuses on the sustainability of watershed management practices in regards to water quantity and water quality, with an emphasis on groundwater and stream systems. This research focus has afforded opportunities to work with watershed and groundwater systems in CO as well as groundwater systems of developing countries. Read More... Ryan received his BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Brigham Young University, his MS in Environmental Science from the University of Guam, and his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Colorado State University. Current projects focus on exploring remediation strategies for salinity and nutrient pollution in stream-aquifer systems in eastern Colorado, and providing assessments of groundwater quantity in the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Maldives under climate stress.

NEES-Soft Collapse Testing

The NEES-Soft Project is a five university and industry, National Science Foundation funded collaboration, designed to study "seismic risk reduction for soft-story woodframe buildings." The goal is to develop a better understanding of the behavior of soft-story woodframe buildings under seismic loads through numerical analyses and experimental testing.

The first four phases with four different retrofits all completed successfully. In the final phase, the building was able to survive 17% drift but ultimately collapsed.

All test videos are available on this Youtube channel.

The most recent project update is available here and you can also view the live camera footage from inside and outside the building here.

Recent article on CBS8.com titled, "Shake table experiment brings down the house".

Choosing a Career in Civil & Environmental Engineering