NCEES Engineering Award

By NCEES.org
Spring 2009

NCEES is pleased to announce that the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Florida A&M University-Florida State University is the grand prize winner of the 2009 NCEES Engineering Award for Connecting Professional Practice and Education. The award jury met March 12, 2009, in Clemson, S.C., to select the $25,000 grand prize winner.

The department received the prize for its submission, Senior Capstone Course: Collection of Projects with Featured Everglades Restoration Project. Through its capstone course, students learn about nontechnical professional issues, such as ethics, teamwork, and communication skills, and complete a design of a civil or environmental engineering project. Professional practitioners participate by giving classroom lectures, providing real-world design projects, mentoring students, and evaluating students' results. The featured senior design project included student teams working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on two restoration projects in the Florida Everglades.

The jury praised the project for demonstrating "strong interactions of practitioners with the engineering faculty and students."

The jury selected five additional prize winners, who will each receive an award of $7,500.