Marwa M. Hassan, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, a significant contributor to knowledge and practice in the areas of sustainable infrastructure materials, sustainable construction, and life-cycle assessment, has been named a Fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Hassan is the CETF Distinguished Professor and Jacobs Professor of Excellence at Louisiana State University. As director of the regional University Transportation Center (UTC) Tran-SET, she leads 11 institutions representing six states. Under her guidance the center has funded over $15 million in research projects and developed educational and workforce development programs aimed at enhancing transportation in Region 6.
Since the late 2000s, her publications have had a substantial impact on multidisciplinary research that crosses boundaries and uses advanced materials to improve mechanistic, environmental, social, and economic performance of civil and construction heavy/highway materials, thus improving the industry’s sustainability. She has also focused on quantifying these improvements using advanced life-cycle assessment methods, including hybrid LCA analysis. Her work has extended the use of experimental testing as well as modeling and simulation to (a) quantify the air quality of our pavements, especially in metropolitan areas, and (b) evaluate the use of innovative materials such as nanomaterials, biomaterials, and self-healing materials in civil and construction applications.
Hassan led a 2012 research effort to mitigate the harmful effects of Urban Heat Island (UHI) through the use of glass cullet and nano-titanium dioxide in the production of asphalt roof shingles as a cool roof strategy. Another research project that her group worked on involved integrating nano TiO2 in pavements to build a new generation of photocatalytic pavements capable of purifying air from traffic pollution. She employed hybrid life-cycle assessment techniques to determine the environmental benefits of the developed technology. In Louisiana, Hassan built the first field study to test the technology in the U.S.
Currently, she is working on developing a new generation of ECC and EGC pavements as well as self-healing and self-rejuvenating materials. In addition, she works closely with industry, associations, and agencies to disseminate and advance the adoption of the developed technologies. Throughout her career, Hassan has attracted research funding exceeding $20 million and authored more than 170 publications, including 73 refereed journal papers and 12 invited presentations. Her work on developing new technologies has resulted in four patent applications.
Hassan served as ASCE’s Construction Research Congress (CRC) president in 2017-18 and as the graduate coordinator in her department at LSU from 2012 to 2018. She was also an assistant specialty editor for the ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering from 2013 to 2017 and has been associate editor of Advances in Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Journal of Coating Science and Technology from 2013 to present.
She has mentored 250 undergraduate students, 50 online master’s students, 13 master’s thesis students, and seven Ph.D. students to completion. Hassan loves volunteer work and continuously seeks to help her community.
