Civil Engineering professor receives Achenbach Medal

Associate Professor Thomas Schumacher is the recipient of the 2020 Achenbach Medal. The Achenbach Medal is an international award that recognizes an individual (within 10 years of Ph.D.) who has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of the field of Structural Health Monitoring.

Dr. Schumacher is one of two recipients of the award, along with Dr. Yanfeng Shen from the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute. The 2020 Achenbach Medal will be presented at the International Workshop for Structural Health Monitoring (IWSHM) to be held at Stanford University in September 2021.

Dr. Schumacher’s primary research interests are in non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of civil infrastructure with a focus on concrete structures. He is interested in stress wave and vibration-based methods such as acoustic emission and ultrasonic monitoring and impulse response testing, respectively. Additionally, he has been collaborating with faculty at the University of Delaware to develop a novel distributed carbon nanotube (CNT)-based sensor that can be integrated with structural composites to form a self-sensing reinforcement to repair and rehabilitate concrete and steel structures. Finally, he is interested in video-based sensing techniques to monitor structural motion. His additional research interests include the behavior and durability of concrete structures, structures subject to extreme events, bridge engineering, data analysis and signal processing, and asset management. The Schumacher research group’s NDE Laboratory is located within the iSTAR Laboratory at PSU.