Austin Wins American Concrete Institute Undergraduate Student Award

David Austin receives his Undergraduate Student Award at the ACI Awards ceremony	Left-to-right: Professor Sameh Badie, Linh Nguyen, and David Austin	Linh Nguyen makes her presentation at the ACI Annual Student Night

On April 15th, the National Capital Chapter of the American Concrete Institute (ACI) presented its Undergraduate Student Award to David Austin, a senior in the GW Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The ACI’s National Capital Chapter presents the award annually to one student in the civil engineering department of each of the universities in the chapter’s region. Austin was nominated by SEAS Professor Sameh Badie, because of the strength of the work he has done in his major. Badie describes Austin as a “hard working and dedicated student.” Austin will graduate in May of this year, but he plans to remain at GW next year to complete his master’s degree. He is studying under GW’s five-year combined bachelor’s/master’s degrees in structural engineering.

On the same occasion, Linh Nguyen, a doctoral student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, gave a presentation on her research work, entitled “Comprehensive Analyses of Bridge Columns under Seismic.” Linh’s research is supervised by Professor Pedro Silva, also of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her presentation was very well received by the audience, and it focused attention on the shake table facility at GW's Virginia Campus, which Linh is using in her experimental investigation.