2019 NHERI REU Cohort from Rice University
Published on July 3, 2019
Rebeca Molina is studying Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. She will start her senior year this fall and anticipates pursuing a masters degree after her graduation. During the spring semester, Rebeca was part of a research project focused on the effect of wollastonite on the compressive strength of rubberized cement mortar, in which she studied the strength of different mortar samples and developed her interest in the use of recyclable materials in civil engineering applications. At Rice University with NHERI DesignSafe, she is developing tools to facilitate the data processing of large geodatabases in QGIS with an emphasis on hurricane debris modeling.
Brandon Dukes is an undergraduate at New Mexico State University, going into his last semester of civil engineering. His research interests include numerical modeling of loads experienced by civil structures under various natural hazards scenarios and structural health monitoring by leveraging artificial intelligence and nondestructive testing. His interest in the intersection of structural engineering and computer science has convinced him to continue on to graduate school after his graduation. With NHERI DesignSafe at Rice University, he is working to enable the efficient analysis and visualization of geo-referenced vector layers in the context of data processing for hurricane debris modeling.