As a US Department of Transportation University Transportation Center, the Mid-America Transportation Center (MATC) selects one student working under affiliated faculty as the Student of the Year. This year's recipient, Khalid Al-Kady, was awarded during the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) Student Banquet that takes place at the annual Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington, D.C. In total, there were 34 students awarded in three areas—multimodal, public transit, and road. Students are nominated by their advising faculty member to a MATC committee that makes a selection based on accomplishments in technical merit and research, academic performance, professionalism, and leadership.
Al-Kady specializes in structural engineering and is expected to receive his PhD in Civil Engineering, with a PhD minor in computer science, in the Fall semester of 2024. His research titled “Novel Pipelines for Dynamic Structural Health Monitoring Using Commercially Available Platforms” used terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) to monitor the dynamic deformations of civil structures. His work as a Graduate Research Assistant is focused on developing robust remote structural health monitoring (SHM) frameworks using remote sensing platforms and computer vision/deep learning algorithms. Specifically, his research developed a novel end-to-end framework to monitor the dynamic vibrations of structures using TLS.
In 2022, Al-Kady presented his research on phased-construction bridges at the Eighth World Conference on Structural Control and Monitoring and the 11th International Conference on Short and Medium Span Bridges (SMSB) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
