ISU Professor Mustafa Mashal receives ASCE Engineer of the Year Award
March 25, 2019
POCATELLO – Idaho State University Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Mustafa Mashal was awarded the Southern Idaho Section Engineer of the Year award at the 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Awards Banquet on March 19.
The awards banquet was part of the ASCE Southern Idaho Section’s first annual civil engineering conference held at Boise State University.
The award is given to a civil engineer with eight-plus years of experience who has made outstanding contribution to the field of civil engineering through leadership, research, and career accomplishment, and contributions to community, society, humanity, promotion of civil engineering profession including mentoring, and serving ASCE at either local, section, regional, or national level. The awardee must be a member of ASCE within Region 8 in good standing.
Mashal is an expert in structural and earthquake engineering. He obtained his Ph.D., master’s and bachelor’s degrees in civil engineering with focus on structural and earthquake engineering from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, University at Buffalo-SUNY in the United States, and Kabul University in Afghanistan, respectively.
He is a registered Professional Engineer in Idaho, a Chartered Professional Engineer and International Professional Engineer in New Zealand (buildings and bridges), and is certified by the Structural Engineering Certification Board in the United States.
Mashal designed and supervised construction of the new Structural LAB (SLAB) at ISU that was officially opened in October 2017. He also supervised the renovation of several other labs in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is an affiliated faculty with the Center for Advanced Energy Studies in Idaho Falls and has collaborated with Idaho National Laboratory. He has been the faculty advisor for the ISU ASCE Student Chapter since August 2016.
Mashal has many years of consulting experience in the United States, New Zealand and Afghanistan. He started his career working on complex projects of the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan in 2006. Following the Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand in 2011, Mashal has been involved with seismic assessment, retrofitting and design of a variety of structures. He has served as an expert for companies in New Zealand and the United States.
In addition, Mashal is the holder of U.S. and international patents on novel metallic seismic devices for vibration protection of structural and non-structural components.
The ISU assistant professor has authored/co-authored more than 50 publications. He has been the recipient of externally funded projects at ISU. Mashal has been working on projects funded by Idaho Transportation Department, Center for Advanced Energy Studies and other funding agencies. He has been serving in several building code/technical committees for buildings and bridges at the national level in the United States.
“I am humbled to know that I was selected for the Engineer of the Year Award,” Mashal said. “ It is a great honor. I have enjoyed my career as a civil engineer and I thank the ASCE Southern Idaho Section for recognizing my contributions to the profession. I dedicate this award to the hard working students of the Department of Civil and Environmental engineering at ISU.”
“This is a great honor for Dr. Mashal and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at ISU,” said Scott Snyder, dean of ISU's College of Science and Engineering and interim vice president for research. “The fact that one of our accomplished assistant professors can win Engineer of the Year speaks to Dr. Mashal's experience working in both industry and academia and the quality of the program he represents.”
Mashal has also been selected to participate in the competitive Center for Advanced Energy Studies Summer Visiting Faculty Program in 2019. The main focus of CAES is collaboration, this summer program has been designed to bring university faculty and Idaho National Laboratory researchers together to interact, build new relationships/networks, and develop joint funded research programs. Mashal will work with collaborators from the INL on areas of mutual research interest.
For more information on Mashal, visit https://sites.google.com/isu.edu/mustafamashal.
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