News & EventsDepartment Events
Events
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Feb19
EVENT DETAILS
Abstract: The increasing frequency of extreme weather events has led to rising network-level failures in transportation systems, such as the 2011 Chicago Blizzard, which trapped hundreds of vehicles due to the propagation of weather-induced congestion. Dr. Huiying ("Fizzy") Fan’s research explores how transportation systems respond to climate impacts at a network level, with the goal of developing cyber-physical systems that model network dynamics and support resilience and decarbonization. This talk will focus on resilience, integrating network modeling, high-performance computing, and multi-scale analysis to examine transportation resilience at three levels: cumulative exposure at the individual trip level, cascading failure at the network level, and tipping points at the multi-temporal level. Dr. Fan will also introduce her ongoing efforts in developing cyber-physical infrastructure for resilient and healthy navigation, incorporating weather-informed sensing, HPC-driven simulation, and AI-powered decision support through six core modules: conceptualization, sensing, simulation, prediction, mitigation, and decision support. Looking ahead, her work aims to equip travelers and agencies with theoretical frameworks and computational tools to navigate uncertainties and make informed decisions.
Bio: Dr. Huiying ("Fizzy") Fan is a Research Engineer II at the Georgia Institute of Technology, an ICICLE Fellow at the NSF AI Institute ICICLE, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at IC-FOODS. She earned her Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering from Georgia Tech, a Master’s from Duke University, and a BSc from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research lies at the intersection of transportation engineering, climate resilience, and data and network science. Dr. Fan examines the complexities of spatiotemporal transportation resilience, focusing on network-level dynamics such as trip-level risk accumulation, cascading failures, and tipping points that could lead to system-wide disruptions. Beyond theoretical contributions, she emphasizes practical applications by developing simulation software tools like SidewalkSim and TransitSim. Outside of research, Dr. Fan has held leadership roles in the Women’s Transportation Seminar’s Student Chapter and the Community and Ethics Committee at Georgia Tech. She has also contributed to education as a co-instructor and instructor of record for three courses, integrating her interdisciplinary research background into the classroom to foster an inclusive and dynamic learning environment.
TIME Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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Feb20
EVENT DETAILS
Abstract: Biomass derived from trees and crops is a promising renewable resource, thanks to their abundance and accessibility, for sustainable aviation fuels. However, the commercialization of bioenergy faces significant challenges, particularly in the handling of granular biomass materials due to unstable flow and jamming in equipment like hoppers and feeders. Addressing these challenges requires a mechanistic understanding of the rheological and constitutive behaviors of milled biomass under various industrial conditions. This presentation explores the mechanical and rheological behavior of milled woody biomass across multiple scales and flow regimes. Following an introduction to the bioenergy industry's logistics and the handling challenges of biomass feedstocks, the discussion will focus on laboratory investigations of fundamental physical properties, hopper flow behavior, and inclined plane tests, complemented by finite element method simulations. These findings contribute to optimizing industrial hopper designs – currently guided by principles established in the 1960s for non-compressible particles – for the unique characteristics of biomass materials. This study promotes the fundamental understanding of milled biomass flow physics across various scales, fosters high-fidelity numerical prediction of the constitutive responses of compressible particles, and enables the development of the next-generation trouble-free biomass handling equipment. By reducing the cost and increasing the safety of feedstock processing, these advancements pave the way for a more sustainable bioenergy future.
Bio: Dr. Yimin Lu earned his Ph.D. degree in Geosystems Engineering and dual M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering and Computational Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering at Texas Tech University (TTU), and holds joint appointments with the National Wind Institute at TTU and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Dr. Lu’s research specializes in granular mechanics and rheology, particle-fluid interaction, and coupled processes related to granular materials, with applications primarily in renewable energy, geohazards, and coastal resilience. His interdisciplinary expertise bridges fundamental mechanics and applied engineering, advancing solutions to critical challenges in sustainable energy security and infrastructure resilience facing climate change.
TIME Thursday, February 20, 2025 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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Feb26
EVENT DETAILS
Abstract: Public transit systems face two, often conflicting design goals: ridership and coverage. The ridership goal involves serving as many people as possible, typically in high-density urban centers. Conversely, the coverage goal treats transit as a social service and measures its success by how good a service it provides to those who badly need it, including those in low-density suburban areas. And while the social significance of the coverage goal has only grown after decades of increasingly suburbanized poverty, a transit agency that takes this too far is likely to face fierce pressure from those who contribute to its resources (e.g., in the form of taxes and fare collection) but do not benefit from such a service plan. This tension speaks to a fundamental difficulty with designing public goods, including but not limited to transit, that take on a social service mission while trying to maintain broad popular support. In this talk, I will approach the design of public infrastructure from the perspective of cooperative game theory. I will introduce non-transferable utility (NTU) linear production (LP) games, which combine the essential game-theoretic elements of public goods with the modeling flexibility of linear programming. I will show that under mild and interpretable conditions, designs that maintain popular support are possible. However, this result is existential: I will show that testing whether a particular design maintains popular support is co-NP-complete. I will also demonstrate how, while one can in principle write a mixed-integer linear programming formulation for the set of popular designs, this approach is vastly impractical even for simple instances, and that natural approaches to obtain a polyhedral relaxation through cutting plane methods can be insufficient. This motivates further research on optimizing over this complicated yet well-structured set. Lastly, I will tie this theory back to transit with a data-driven, Chicago-based implementation that illustrates the impact of maintaining popular support on the distribution of quality of service for coverage-oriented transit designs.
Bio: Juan Carlos Martínez Mori is a Schmidt Science Fellow and a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow with the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to his current appointment, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath, formerly MSRI) as part of their thematic program on Algorithms, Fairness, and Equity. He earned his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 2023 and his BSc in Civil Engineering and minor in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. His primary research interests span transportation, optimization, and game theory, with additional prior work in algebraic combinatorics and sports analytics. As a frequent transit rider, he is interested in methodological approaches that support more accessible and convenient public transportation.
Bio: Dr. Yimin Lu earned his Ph.D. degree in Geosystems Engineering and dual M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering and Computational Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering at Texas Tech University (TTU), and holds joint appointments with the National Wind Institute at TTU and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Dr. Lu’s research specializes in granular mechanics and rheology, particle-fluid interaction, and coupled processes related to granular materials, with applications primarily in renewable energy, geohazards, and coastal resilience. His interdisciplinary expertise bridges fundamental mechanics and applied engineering, advancing solutions to critical challenges in sustainable energy security and infrastructure resilience facing climate change.
TIME Wednesday, February 26, 2025 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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Feb28
EVENT DETAILS
TBA
TIME Friday, February 28, 2025 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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Feb28
EVENT DETAILS
TBA
TIME Friday, February 28, 2025 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Andrew Liguori andrew.liguori@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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Mar15
EVENT DETAILS
Winter Classes End
TIME Saturday, March 15, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Mar17
EVENT DETAILS
Winter exams begin
TIME Monday, March 17, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Mar22
EVENT DETAILS
Spring Break Begins
TIME Saturday, March 22, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Mar31
EVENT DETAILS
Spring Break Ends
TIME Monday, March 31, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Apr1
EVENT DETAILS
Spring Classes Begin - Northwestern Monday: Classes scheduled to meet on Mondays meet on this day.
TIME Tuesday, April 1, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar