Zachary C. Grasley, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, professor of civil and environmental engineering, professor of materials science and engineering, and Zachry Chair for Construction Integration at Texas A&M University, has been named a Fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Grasley joined the faculty of Texas A&M University as an assistant professor in 2006. He moved to the faculty of Virginia Tech in 2012 as an associate professor, then returned to Texas A&M in 2014. After his return, he was named the Peter C Forster Faculty Fellow I and then the Phillips ’66 First-Year Faculty Fellow, before being named Presidential Impact Fellow, a lifelong title bestowed by the university president in recognition of research achievements and promise. In 2018, Grasley was appointed director of the Center for Infrastructure Renewal (CIR) at Texas A&M.
Throughout his career, Grasley has been selected for numerous awards and honors recognizing his research and teaching, with his efforts in the field of creep and shrinkage of concrete being particularly noteworthy. He proposed new mechanisms of creep and irreversible shrinkage based on dissolution effects, and co-developed thermodynamics-based models to quantify the impacts of the new mechanisms. His work on creep and shrinkage disrupted decades-long understanding of time-dependent deformation of concrete, and resulted in three journal articles being cited for “best paper” awards.
As director of the CIR, Grasley heads up one of the most advanced infrastructure research and training facilities in the U.S. His role as director involves providing leadership on research and training initiatives, coordinating large-scale efforts, and interfacing with industry and government partners. As director, he has helped develop large-scale research opportunities for his colleagues and provided mentoring on collaborative research and writing competitive research proposals. The CIR is involved with annual research expenditures totaling around $20 million, resulting in new technologies that impact infrastructure in Texas, the U.S., and beyond.
In addition to his academic role, Grasley also serves on the Board of Advisors for OSL Concrete Inc. and has completed several consulting projects with industry. A Fellow of the American Concrete Institute and of the American Ceramic Society, he is on the editorial board of the ACI Materials Journal and formerly served as associate editor of ASCE’s Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering.
Grasley holds a B.S. in civil engineering (2001) from Michigan Technological University and an M.S. (2003) and Ph.D. (2006) in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
