Dr. Peggy Johnson: Rivers, Bridges, and Reflections

About This Event

Rivers, Bridges, and Reflections
Intended for a general audience

In an effort to keep bridges safe, engineers have battled erosion at bridges over water for many decades. Adding to this challenge is the need to manage streams across watersheds to reduce overall erosion and improve stream habitat. Maintaining safe and reliable bridges while also improving larger-scale stream conditions is a challenging task. Based on 30 years of research in this field, Dr. Johnson will discuss the issues and improvements that have been made in addressing this challenge. She will also provide an overview of her career, including highlights of this research and reflections on a wonderful career.

About Dr. Johnson

Dr. Peggy Johnson is Dean and Professor Emerita of Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph.D. in 1990 from the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at the University of Maryland, after which she was a Professor of Civil Engineering for 30 years. She retired in August 2021 as the Dean of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State. From 2006 to 2015, she was the Head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Penn State. Over her three decades as a Professor in Civil Engineering, she conducted research and taught classes in the areas of hydraulic engineering, bridge scour, stream restoration, reliability analyses, and river mechanics. As the Dean, she also taught courses on leadership. She has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals on bridge scour, stream restoration, uncertainty in hydraulics, bridge scour, and stream restoration, and the probability of bridge failure due to scour. She has conducted research on the stability and vulnerability of stream channel designs at bridges. She is the Past-President and a Fellow of the ASCE Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI), the largest institute within ASCE with more than 23,000 members. In 2016 she received the ASCE Hans Albert Einstein award for her contributions in the use of sediment transport for the evaluation and design of in-stream control structures and stream restoration projects and the use of uncertainty and risk management for scour analyses. She also received the ASCE-EWRI Outstanding Woman of the Year award in 2012. In addition to winning several teaching awards, Dr. Johnson won the National Science Foundation Young Investigator award and in 1995, she won the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow award.