RailTEC Student Wins Fulbright Award

April 2018: RailTEC Graduate Research Assistant Tom Roadcap was recently awarded a prestigious Fulbright Research Award. Fulbrighters have the opportunity to meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, and at home. Tom's work will be carried out at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) under the guidance of Professor Stephan Freudenstein, and will focus on railroad track infrastructure research. During the 8-10 month study period Tom will live in Munich, Germany and will attend lectures at TUM and build relationships in academia and within the European rail industry.

CEE Awards Convocation 2018 RailTEC Winners

Pictured with Professor and RailTEC Executive Director Chris Barkan are (l-r) Weixi Li, Geordie Roscoe and Jasmine Munoz.

April 2018: Congratulations to the four RailTEC students who were awarded University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Civil and Environmental Engineering honors this year at the CEE Awards Convocation on Saturday, April 7, 2018 at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center. The winners are:

• Weixi Li – Charles E. DeLeuw Travel Award. (Enables an outstanding civil engineering student to inspect urban public transportation systems in foreign countries.)

• Jasmine Munoz – Norman Carlson Scholarship. (Encourages students to pursue careers in the rail industry.)

• Andi Li – Wayne C. Teng Scholarship. (Demonstrates potential strength for defining and solving a wide range of civil engineering problems.)

• Geordie Roscoe – CN Railway Transportation Scholarship. (Encourages and supports student excellence in rail engineering.)

Ballast research highlighted in RT&S

April 2018: Illinois ballast research was recently highlighted in the March 2018 issue of Railway Track & Structures (RT&S) Magazine. Supported through AAR's Technology Outreach research program, this research developed a new approach to inspecting railroad ballast and measuring its condition in the field. This innovative technique uses cross-section digital images of ballast and a machine vision system to measure the size of ballast particles and estimate ballast degradation. Transportation Technology Center, Inc. (TTCI) performed investigative field work at their Facility for Accelerated Service Testing (FAST) near Pueblo, CO. Click here to read the article.

RailTEC Students Awarded AREMA Scholarships

March 2018: The AREMA Educational Foundation recently announced the winners of their 2018 scholarships. Twelve of the 32 AREMA scholarships given went to students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The scholarships won by Illinois students this year collectively total over $36,000. The winners are:

• Josue Cesar Bastos
• Nao Nishio
• Arthur de Oliveira Lima
• Brevel Holder
• Weixi Li
• Darkhan Mussanov
• Chen-Yu Lin
• Ricardo J. Quiros Orozco
• Geordie Roscoe
• Thomas A. Roadcap
• Bryan C. Sooter (online MS student)
• Zezhou Wang

The AREMA Educational Foundation provides scholarships to engineering students who are specializing in the railway industry and supports other educational and training endeavors that help to ensure the future of the profession. For a complete list of names and their awarded scholarships, click here. Congratulations to all!

Excellent RailTEC Teachers

March 2018: Congratulations are in store for the three RailTEC instructors who taught classes in Fall 2017. Chris Barkan (CEE 408 – Railroad Transportation Engineering), Tyler Dick (CEE 598 – Railway Terminal Design and Operations) and Conrad Ruppert, Jr. (CEE 409 – Railroad Track Engineering) were all rated as excellent or outstanding on the University of Illinois' "List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students". These lists are compiled on a semester basis and reflect student ratings of instruction. The ratings are based on Instructor and Course Evaluation (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation, Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning.