Mac Eng faculty, alumni elected as fellows of Canadian Academy of Engineering

Six McMaster Engineering-affiliated professionals, including professors and alumni, have been elected to the Canadian Academy of Engineering in recognition of their outstanding contributions to their fields.

Seminar Day 2022

We are pleased to announce the winners from our 2022 Graduate Seminar Day.  Congratulations to the winners – you set the bar high!

Thank you to everyone who participated.  We look forward to seeing you in person at next year’s event!

Welcome Dr. Moncef Nehdi!

Dr. Moncef Nehdi has joined McMaster University and the Department of Civil Engineering as of January 1^st, 2022, as a tenured Professor and the new Department Chair. Dr. Nehdi’s research focuses on sustainability and resilience in civil infrastructure, computational intelligence modeling, and the use of innovative materials for construction and energy storage. In addition, he has great interest in university governance and experiential learning, as well as in equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization in higher education. Dr. Nehdi joins us from Western University in London, where he served as Associate Director for Environmental Research Western.

He received his bachelor’s from Laval University, his master’s from Sherbrooke University, and his PhD from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Nehdi is also the Founder and Director of NCS Inc., and previously was Technical Director for Imasco Minerals Inc., and Technical Manager for BCS, and for Modern Technology Laboratories. Dr. Nehdi is a fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, the American Concrete Institute, and the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering. Dr. Nehdi has provided consulting services for high profile construction projects in Canada and abroad and has been an active member on numerous technical committees od the American Concrete Institute and the Canadian Standards Association, as well as being a member of the editorial boards of several technical journals. He is a prolific author with more than 400 peer-reviewed publications and was listed among the world’s most cited civil engineers by Elsevier and the Shanghai Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, and in the Stanford University ranking. He served as Chair of the ACI committee 555 on recycled materials, chair of the CSCE committee on cement and concrete, vice-chair of the CSCE Mechanics Division, and was co-chair of the Infrastructure Division of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant Committee 1509.

Dr Nehdi has received numerous awards, including the Engineering Medal for Research and Development from the Ontario Professional Engineers, the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award, the ACI Award for Professional Achievement, the CSCE Horst Liepholz Medal, the CSCE Whitman Wright award, the Bill Curtin Metal from the UK’s Institution of Civil Engineers, the ASCE Faculty Fellow Award for Excellence in Engineering Education, the Mohan Mathur Award for Excellence in Teaching, along with several best paper awards and other recognitions.

WTS International 2021 Women in Transportation Awards

Jing Li (left) – Focused Scholarship

Jing is a first-year Ph.D. student at McMaster University and a researcher with the AI-enhanced Mobility Lab at McMaster. Her research focuses on machine learning-enhanced traffic prediction, analysis of the spatial-temporal impact of traffic incidents, prediction of traffic incidents’ risk and severity, all under the supervision of Dr. Hao Yang.  She has published three journal papers and holds two patents. Jing has received several awards and recognitions, the most recent is the 2021 WTS Toronto Area Chapter Scholarship and the Outstanding Graduate Student award. Jing’s career goal is to be a transportation professional leading research teams that promote safe and efficient trips based on connected and autonomous vehicles.

Olivia Wiper (right) – Undergraduate Scholarship

Olivia is a second year Civil Engineering & Society student. She is passionate about incorporating sustainability into her work and hopes to improve transportation infrastructure in her future endeavours. She also enjoys learning languages in her free time. Olivia has studied French extensively in high school and on exchange in Geneve, Switzerland and is currently learning Mandarin on an application known as Duolingo. Some of her other hobbies include baking, and animal care. At school, she has participated in clubs such as the McMaster Solar Car Project where she helped the chassis sub team, the McMaster Engiqueers, and the Welcome Week group known as the RedSuits. She is very excited to have been awarded the 2021 WTS Toronto Area Chapter Scholarship and looks forward to meeting everyone within this wonderful community.

Moustafa Naiem Awarded 2019 Vanier CGS Scholarship

The Department of Civil Engineering is proud to announce that Moustafa Naiem, PhD student has been awarded a Vanier CGS Scholarship. Named after Major-General Georges P. Vanier, the first francophone Governor General of Canada, the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (Vanier CGS) is awarded to top ranking doctoral students who demonstrate academic excellence, research potential, and leadership.

Student Bio: 
Moustafa Naiem is a graduate from the Structural Engineering department in Cairo University in Egypt, earning his B.Sc. degree in 2016 and graduating first-of-class. He worked as a Teaching Assistant while earning his Masters degree in Structural Topology Optimization and Steel Structures Design at the same university in 2018.  Moustafa’s passion went beyond academia – he was involved in reshaping the extra-curricular community at Cairo University during his undergraduate years. He was the co-founder and license holder for TEDxCairoUniversity for over three years, held a TEDx conference, and later became a mentor for the TEDx Community – and other organizations – in Egypt. At McMaster University, Moustafa has been developing measures to quantify critical infrastructure network resilience in cities under climate change-induced systemic (cascade) risks. His work has the potential to save billions of dollars.

Title of Research Proposal: 
“A Resilient Canada in the Face of Climate Change-Induced Systemic Risks”

Lay Abstract of the proposed research: 
In the past decades, Canada has witnessed a continuous increase in the frequency and magnitude of climate change-induced natural disasters. These events include droughts, floods, wildfires, and most recently, tornadoes. In 2016, climate change induced damage was estimated to be $8.6 billion in Canada, while in the United States of America, floods are becoming one of the costliest and highest in occurrence of all climate change induced hazards, costing an average of $8 billion dollars annually. Also, hurricanes such as hurricane Sandy cost over $67 billion dollars of total damage, while more recently. hurricane Florence resulted in an estimated damage of $5 billion so far. It is thus clear that the effect of climate change is already costing Canadians billions of dollars annually, at an increasing rate. Given the effect of these events on cities, there is yet to be a clear methodology to quantify a city’s resilience in the face of such hazards, and predict the losses, that also takes into account the interdependence of different infrastructure networks. Although there have been multiple frameworks in literature, none has been comprehensive for a large-scale city. As such, the proposed methodology introduces the utilization of several Machine Learning techniques to propose a 4-steps framework that quantifies city resilience under floods.