ASCE has honored Idil Akin, Ph.D., M.ASCE, and Surya S.C. Congress, Ph.D., M.ASCE, with the 2026 Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award. Akin is recognized for her technical achievements and ability to generate high-impact research, secure competitive funding, teach effectively, and serve the profession. Congress is recognized for his exceptional leadership, innovative research, practical applications, and profound dedication to the profession.
Akin has held leadership roles in the natural hazards, unsaturated soils, and geoenvironmental engineering communities, including secretary of the NHERI User forum, chair of the GI Geoenvironmental Technical Committee award subcommittee, and associate editor of Environmental Geotechnics. Her publication record is exceptional for her career stage, with papers in the top journals of the field. She is also an accomplished educator and mentor, teaching a range of undergraduate and graduate courses at Washington State University and North Carolina State University, including Geotechnical Engineering, Soil and Site Improvement, Unsaturated Soil Mechanics, and Engineering Behavior of Soils and Foundations.
She was also one of the first to investigate post-wildfire landslides. Her pioneering work has advanced understanding of post-wildfire environments and landslide initiation mechanisms. Akin has been applying her research to timely, practical problems such as the behavior of near-surface soils affected by fire and the mechanical behavior of plants for agriculture. She has also conducted research on using recycled materials in geotechnical construction applications, such as recycled asphalt pavement. Her work has a strong science focus, demonstrating her strong foundation in fundamentals, but also emphasizes applications in geotechnical engineering. Akin is a very careful and thoughtful experimentalist, creating unique and exceptionally well-characterized data sets to test her hypotheses.
Congress’s work on transportation geotechnical infrastructure asset management, leveraging uncrewed aerial vehicles, machine learning, deep neural networks, computer vision, and digital twin technology is transformative, groundbreaking research. His innovative solutions are reshaping how we monitor, assess, and manage critical transportation assets like bridges, pavements, rails, slopes, and dams. He has publication record of 101 total publications, including 52 journal papers and 44 refereed conference papers; this number of publications is particularly remarkable for a researcher at his career stage. His recent contributions to top-tier journals, such as the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering, Canadian Geotechnical Engineering Journal, Transportation Research Record, Transportation Geotechnics, and Engineering Geology, all demonstrate his leadership in solving complex Geotech problems.
Beyond his scholarly output, Congress has demonstrated exceptional leadership in securing significant research funding. As lead principal investigator, he has successfully secured close to $1.5 million from federal and state funding agencies like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Federal Railroad Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, and Michigan and Minnesota Departments of Transportation in the last couple of years, with additional substantial contributions as a Co-PI from agencies like National Science Foundation, USDOT, and others.
The Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award is presented in recognition of outstanding accomplishments as evidenced by completed works, reports, or papers in the field of geotechnical engineering. The award was established to provide professional development opportunities for outstanding young practitioners, researchers, and teachers of geotechnical engineering.
