Civil Engineering Students Take Home Multiple Awards at ASCE Metro Student Symposium

The American Society of Civil Engineers: Stony Brook Chapter (ASCE-SBU) participated in the 2025 ASCE Metropolitan Student Symposium, held April 25 to 27 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). Over 15 colleges and universities attended the event filled with networking workshops, professional development activities and six technical competitions.

The ACSE-SBU Chapter had the best showing ever and Stony Brook University's students showed their creative thinking, engineering prowess and professionalism. They took home multiple awards:

• ASCE-SBU won 1st place in the Construction Institute competition with the Best Speaker award going to freshman Logan Norton-Lapsley.

• They also won 1st place in the 3D Printing competition during their team's inaugural participation.This is a pilot competition that originated at NJIT to promote the application of additive manufacturing technology in civil engineering.

• Their Surveying team had a back-to-back win with another 1st place victory against even more competition this year, and are planning to attend Nationals at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in late June.

• The Steel Bridge team had their best results ever, completing assembly of their bridge faster than last year and passing all the loading requirements of the competition - including withstanding 2,500 pounds of superposed weight.

• Lastly their Concrete Canoe finished solidly in 3rd place with a better canoe design this year that succeeded in the Swamp test where last year's couldn't.

Lucas Tom-Wong, president of ASCE-SBU said, "I can't wait for students, faculty, and staff to hear about the hard work and dedication that their peers in ASCE have done over the past year. It's been truly an amazing experience to be able to work with everyone on the ASCE team, and I believe the fruits of their labor and passion have really been seen by this year's results."

Civil engineering faculty supporting this year's participation of the ASCE-SBU team included Rigoberto Burgueño (ASCE-SBU faculty advisor), Frank Flanagan, Justin Antonette, Marija Krstic, Ci-Jyun Liang and Gregory Tarquinio. Professor Burgueño, chair of the Department of Civil Engineering, noted: "We could not be prouder of our students, who with great independence and limited resources continue to outdo themselves and represent our department and university exceptionally. It was a great experience to support them during the symposium weekend and see their efforts pay off."

ASCE is the umbrella professional society in the civil engineering community and university chapters provide students with networking and educational activities, sharing of resources, and opportunities to participate in conferences, symposia and competitions. Regional student symposia are held yearly during the spring. SBU hosted the 2024 Metropolitan Regional Competition.