Liu Receives Wadell Fellowship

September 6, 2024

Yati LiuCongratulations to Transportation Engineering doctoral candidate Yati Liu, who is this year's recipient of the Robert P. Wadell Endowed Fellowship for Civil Engineering Innovation

“This is a great honor,” says Liu. “I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my professor, Mark Hansen, for his invaluable support and guidance throughout this journey. I am also sincerely thankful to Mr. Robert P. Wadell for the fellowship, which has provided invaluable support for my research.”

Liu’s research focuses on sustainable aviation, energy use modeling, the development of low-carbon corridors, and state policies to promote aviation decarbonization. 

“Yati Liu has developed models for predicting aviation fuel consumption and analyzing policies to promote aviation decarbonization that will prove very useful to California and other states in developing initiatives to make aviation more sustainable." says advisor Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Mark Hansen.

Robert Wadell is a distinguished and remarkably dedicated alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his B.S. in 1967 and M.S. in 1968 in Civil Engineering; his graduate work centered on planning and design through the Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering (now the Institute of Transportation Studies, ITS), under the supervision of Professor Robert Horonjeff, a national leader in airport design. Five years after graduation, Mr. Wadell founded Wadell Engineering Corporation, a San Francisco Bay Area consulting firm, where he is President and CEO. He established the Robert P. Wadell Endowed Fellowship for Civil Engineering Innovation in 2017.

“My goal is to foster innovation in both research and the practice of civil engineering,” said Wadell. “These doctoral students will be the future innovators and leaders in their fields.”

The Fellowship is used to provide endowed support for high-achieving doctoral students in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California Berkeley. It is the donor’s first preference that recipients be students studying transportation and systems (particularly air transportation).