Engineering graduate student Tiffany Adams honored by Oregon State University
Tiffany Adams, a Ph.D. candidate in Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named to Oregon State University’s Council of Early Career Engineers, one of three categories of awards for the university’s outstanding engineering alumni.
Chris Bell, associate dean of engineering at Oregon State, recently traveled to Virginia Tech to present Adams with her award.
After completing her bachelor’s degree at Oregon State in 1995, Adams earned a master’s degree in civil engineering from Virginia Tech in 1996 and then began her professional career at URS in Denver, Co. In 2001, Adams moved back to the northwest for a job with PanGEO, Inc., where she worked on a wide variety of public and private projects.
In recognition of her early career accomplishments, Adams received the Edmund Friedman Young Engineer Award for Professional Achievement in 2004, one of only five such awards presented to younger members of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
Adams, of Portland, Ore., returned to Virginia Tech in January 2006 to begin her Ph.D. program in the geotechnical engineering program of the Via Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She is studying as an Exploring Interfaces through Graduate Education and Research (EIGER) Fellow under George Filz, professor of civil and environmental engineering.
EIGER, funded by the National Science Foundation, explores naturally occurring interfaces among minerals, water, air, and microorganisms. A central feature of EIGER is that it is led by an integrated team of principal investigators at Virginia Tech, including Filz. Adams’ research will focus on the stability of embankments founded on improved soft ground and will support the current effort to upgrade levee protection along the Gulf Coast. She is also the recipient of a Via Fellowship from Virginia Tech’s Via Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech is internationally recognized for its excellence in 14 engineering disciplines and computer science. The college's 5,500 undergraduates benefit from an innovative curriculum that provides a "hands-on, minds-on" approach to engineering education, complementing classroom instruction with two unique design-and-build facilities and a strong Cooperative Education Program. With more than 50 research centers and numerous laboratories, the college offers its 1,800 graduate students opportunities in advanced fields of study such as biomedical engineering, state-of-the-art microelectronics, and nanotechnology.
