Carraro named interim chair

Antonio Carraro has been named interim chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Carraro joined the department in January as a tenured associate professor and director of WSU's Geotechnical Engineering Laboratory. His areas of research include fabric-sensitive soil mechanics and sustainable and resilient infrastructure, where he develops practical tools in soil mechanics that civil and geotechnical engineers can use to effectively design, build, and maintain engineering infrastructure. He is particularly interested in using recycled materials to replace natural soils in sustainable geomaterial technologies. Carraro is also interested in neurodiversity and cognitive learning in civil engineering, using hands-on experiential teaching and learning methods and visual thinking approaches in geotechnical design and education.

Before joining WSU, he was a senior lecturer at Imperial College London, and associate professor at the University of Western Australia and at Colorado State University. He serves as associate editor for the American Society of Civil Engineering's (ASCE) Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering and has served on the editorial boards of Géotechnique and ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering.

Carraro holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Purdue University, and a master's and bachelor's degrees in Engenharia Civil from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil. He replaces Xianming Shi, who has accepted a position at the University of Miami.