Erol Tutumluer, Ph.D., Dist.M.ASCE, the Abel Bliss professor specializing in transportation geotechnics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been honored with election by ASCE for its class of 2025 distinguished members. He is recognized for his leadership, education, innovation, and mentorship in transportation, geotechnical, and civil engineering.
Tutumluer’s exceptional academic acumen, extensive research and education contributions, and transformative accomplishments have firmly established him as an extraordinarily qualified and revered figure in the realm of civil engineering. He is a pioneer in transportation geotechnics, in which he develops and implements geomechanics principles for the analysis and design of transportation facilities, such as highway and airfield pavements and railway track structures.
As the country has moved toward a mechanistic-based pavement design, contributions of researchers well-founded in geomechanics have become critically important. Through his work, Tutumluer employs fundamentals of geomechanics and applies new technologies such as artificial intelligence, smart sensors, and computer vision for infrastructure monitoring. In this sense, he makes significant contributions that impact the designs of layered pavement and track systems dramatically, such research also being a national priority area with significant funding and a desire for policy changes and renovation of the practice.
He has pioneered innovative research and techniques for achieving smart, sustainable, and resilient infrastructure systems, including aggregate image analyzer and stockpile analysis programs based on deep learning and AI. He led the development of an innovative bender element field sensor for determining modulus properties of constructed aggregate layers and stiffening effects of geosynthetics in aggregate layer stabilization and an automated ballast scanning vehicle for imaging-based segmentation for railroad ballast using deep learning algorithms.
One of his most notable achievements is the development of a flexible pavement analysis program, C-FLEX, and its software platform, JEDI 2D, which is currently under development for the Department of Defense, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and others.
He has also developed rutting models for unbound layers and implemented them in studying full-scale pavement test sections at the National Airport Pavement Test Facility of the Federal Aviation Administration. He developed and implemented novel shear wave measurement technology to quantify stiffness of unstabilized and geosynthetic stabilized aggregate layers in NAPTF.
Tutumluer is an outstanding mentor to his students and has graduated 27 doctoral and 47 master’s students, many of whom have gone on to be today’s top leaders in academia and industry. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Transportation Geotechnics, Council Member and Stabilization Technical Committee chair of the International Society of Geosynthetics (IGS), Executive Board member of TRB’s Transportation Infrastructure Group, member of AREMA, and the previous chair of ISSMGE’s Technical Committee 202–Transportation Geotechnics.
Tutumluer is an exceptional leader, researcher, educator, and mentor who has successfully translated research findings to the profession through the development of novel test methods, analysis software, and design guidelines. He has offered numerous short courses and workshops to facilitate the transfer of knowledge to the professional community.
His career includes numerous awards, such as the 2020 ASCE James Laurie Prize, Geo-Institute’s 2021 Carl L. Monismith Lecture Award, and the 2023 International Geosynthetics Society Award. In 2024, he received the ASCE Francis C. Turner Award, delivered ISSMGE’s Proctor Lecture during the 5th International Conference on Transportation Geotechnics in Sydney, Australia, and was selected to chair a federal working group by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Over the course of his career, Tutumluer has been involved with over 125 externally funded research projects worth more than $20 million in project funds, serving as principal investigator or co-PI, and has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers.
