Meet the new civil and environmental engineering faculty
Admin Husic - Environmental and Water Resources
Admin Husic is joining as an Associate Professor. He comes to Virginia Tech from his position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas. Prior to that, he graduated from the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Kentucky with his doctoral degree in 2018. He also earned his B.S. and M.S. in civil engineering from the University of Kentucky in 2014 and 2015. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an NSF Track-4 Fellowship, and $2.2M in research funding as PI. His research aims to understand how human and climatic forces impact water quality variation in rivers. He leverages aquatic sensing, geochemical tracing, deep learning, and explainable AI to solve vexing problems in hydrology and ensure the equitable access and security of water for all people.
Ryan Beemer - Geotechnical Engineering
Ryan D. Beemer is joining as an assistant professor in geotechnical engineering. He earned his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2016 and later served as a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Offshore Foundation Systems at the University of Western Australia. A specialist in marine geotechnical engineering, Dr. Beemer's expertise encompasses the study of problematic carbonate and glauconite marine sediments, the development of offshore foundation and anchoring systems, and advanced techniques such as geotechnical centrifuge scale modeling and X-ray microtomography. His research is particularly focused on foundations and anchors for offshore wind systems, the laboratory testing of marine sediments, and and the analysis of sands using X-ray microtomography.
Hongrui Yu - Construction Engineering and Management
Hongrui Yu is joining as an assistant professor after completing her Ph.D. in civil engineering at the University of Michigan. She holds an M.S. in civil and environmental engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2019 and an M.S. in Robotics from the University of Michigan in 2024. Her work is about equipping construction robots with the necessary craft skills with imitation learning, cloud robotics, and virtual reality. Her work shapes an ergonomic and inclusive robotic construction future for workers who have diverse physical capabilities and educational backgrounds. Her contributions were recognized with the Best Paper Award at the 2024 ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering and Runner-Up Best Poster Award at the 2023 ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering. Continuing her work, Hongrui will start up a construction robotics lab dedicated to advancing Construction Automation, inclusive robotics technology, and Human-Robot Collaboration.