National Institute for Transportation and Communities

This Small Starts study offers sustainable road building materials for rural infrastructure, from an unlikely source. Approximately 7,000 years ago, the eruption of Oregon's Mt. Mazama blanketed the Klamath Basin region with a thick layer of volcanic ash. Matthew Sleep, an associate professor of civil engineering at Oregon Tech, investigated the use of this ash as a natural pozzolan for soil stabilization and unpaved roadway improvement. He found that the ash, prevalent in Southern Oregon, ha... Read More

This grant supported coursework and laboratory development and expanded research capacity, promoting (a) innovative learning activities that expose students to cutting-edge methods of bridge structural health and behavior monitoring and (b) research by our growing group of graduate students using developing technologies (specifically, shake tables and iPods with on-board accelerometers). As transportation infrastructure reaches and exceeds its design life, engineering efforts are turning to e... Read More