Civil and Environmental Engineering Names Tomasini Professors

Donald Tomasini	by Mark Blehm, student writer, Tech Today, Nov 15, 2007 Thanks to a generous donation by a Michigan Tech alumnus, several professors were recently named Donald and Rose Ann Tomasini Professors in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. They include assistant professors Veronica W. Griffis, Yue Li, Amlan Mukherjee, Zhanping You and Jacob Hiller. In 2003 Donald Tomasini, a 1954 alumnus of Michigan Tech who owned his own construction firm in mid-Wisconsin, donated $1 million to the civil and environmental engineering department, no strings attached, specifically instructing then-department chair Bob Baillod to “do whatever he thought would be best for Michigan Tech.” Baillod called the gift “transformational” for the department. Sadly, Tomasini passed away before he could see the results of his generosity. “This gift has afforded us the ability to hire top-quality faculty members by providing money to get their teaching and research programs up and running. We have been able to hire graduates of some of the best civil and environmental engineering departments across the country,” said civil and environmental engineering department chair Neil Hutzler. "It's my way of returning a little bit of what Michigan Tech gave to me. I couldn't have gotten a better education at any other place," Tomasini said. "I really believe in treating people the way I want to be treated. Be firm, but be fair. Help others. I met an old guy, who lived to 92, and he used to tell me, 'The more you give, the more you get.'"
	Griffis, who specializes in water resources engineering, earned her PhD in Civil Engineering from Cornell University. Her teaching interests include probability and statistics, stochastic hydrology, numerical methods, water resources and risk analysis and management. Her research interests include flood frequency analysis and the analysis of other extreme events, uncertainty analysis and impacts of climate variability, climate change and land use changes.
	Li, who specializes in structural engineering, received his PhD and MS in Civil Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include natural hazard mitigation, probabilistic risk assessment, performance-based engineering, bridge engineering, earthquake engineering, wind engineering and wood engineering.
	Mukherjee, who specializes in construction engineering, earned his PhD from the University of Washington. His research interests lie in interactive and adaptive process simulation platforms for decision making and training decision makers.
	You, who specializes in transportation engineering, received his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His teaching interests include construction materials, pavement engineering, numerical modeling, transportation engineering and bituminous materials and mix design. His research interests focus on asphalt materials characterization and mix design, performance evaluation and rehabilitation with an emphasis on micromechanical modeling of asphalt mixtures and numerical analysis of pavement structures.
	Hiller, who also specializes in transportation engineering, holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include cohesive zone modeling of top-down crack propagation in rigid pavement, use of X-ray tomography to characterize microcracking in PCC pavements, utilization of recycled materials in PCC pavements, curling stress relaxation of rigid pavement slabs, use of precast PCC pavements in urban settings and field evaluation of built-in curling levels in rigid pavements.

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