Two Civil Engineering Students Receive Fellowships

• U of A
• Civil Engineering
• Two Civil Engineering Students Receive Fellowships

Magdalena Asborno(left) received a Doctoral Academy Fellowship and Sadie Smith(right); a Distinguished Doctoral Fellowship.

Asborno received her BS degree in civil engineering from La Plata University in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and her MS in refining, gas, and marketing from the Energy Superior Institute in Madrid, Spain.  

“I am excited for Ms. Asborno to become a valuable addition to my research team and am eager to collaborate with her to develop a proposal to assess the costs and benefits of travel demand model improvements” Said, Dr. Sarah Hernandez.

Asborno’s research will develop methods for enhanced performance-based freight planning.  Her current project is an evaluation of the use of river port terminal access roads by heavy trucks sponsored by the Maritime Transportation Research and Education Center (MarTREC).

Sadie Smith received her undergrad and graduate degree in civil engineering from the University of Arkansas. Smith’s research will closely examine Full-Depth Reclamation, or FDR, a pavement rehabilitation technique that grinds up an existing road and stabilizes it with either asphalt emulsion, asphalt foam, or Portland cement.  This reduces the amount of new material necessary to build the road, and in many cases reduces the cost and emissions produced of the road work.  However, fundamental material properties, such as how the binding agents “glue” the grinded road together are not well understood, and Sadie will work with other disciplines to gain a better understanding of these properties.

Dr. Andrew Braham stated: “Sadie is returning to graduate school at the University of Arkansas after working for industry for a year and I could not be happier.  Sadie excelled in completing her undergraduate honors thesis and master’s thesis on Full-Depth Reclamation, and she will continue working in this area for her doctorate.”