Clarkson University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Pedro Fernández-Cabán has received the Tau Beta Pi Faculty Award.
Tau Beta Pi’s New York Theta Chapter at Clarkson University presents this award annually to a faculty member who has embodied and instilled in students the ideals of integrity and excellence in engineering.
Professor Fernández-Cabán’s nomination for the award by current chapter members additionally recognized “the effort [he has] put into fostering the futures of the current students.” The award wishes that Fernández-Cabán continues to remain a role model for future students.
Tau Beta Pi is the oldest engineering honor society, and the only engineering honor society representing the entire engineering profession. The New York Theta Chapter was established in December of 1941 and has inducted over 3,700 members since then.
Fernández-Cabán joined Clarkson in July of 2019. He has taught Reinforced Concrete Design, Steel Design, and Computational Methods of Structural Analysis at Clarkson’s Coulter School of Engineering. Fernández-Cabán is also a wonderful student advisor to many civil and environmental engineering students.
Fernández-Cabán became a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society while completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. He is currently a member of several professional organizations including the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and American Association for Wind Engineering (AAWE).
Fernández-Cabán’s research interests center on enhancing civil infrastructure performance under wind and other natural hazards. His work has been published in many peer-reviewed journal articles, focusing mainly on wind engineering, civil infrastructure performance, and structural optimization.
Professor Fernández-Cabán was also recently awarded a $200K NSF grant to continue his research to explore new methods for mitigating wind damage on low-rise buildings. The research will integrate physical wind tunnel experiments, machine learning, and computational fluid dynamics to reliably predict extreme wind load effects on roof systems of low-rise buildings. Read more about that here.
Fernández-Cabán earned his Ph.D. and M.E. in civil engineering from the University of Florida in 2017 and his bachelor of science degree in civil engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Prior to Clarkson, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Maryland.
