Category: News and Updates
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New paper out! CIRCLE lab collaborated with Drexel’s Water lab to understand the impact of circular water strategies in urban resilience
Have you ever wondered about the impacts of circular economy in urban resilience? What would happen if the City invested in household strategies like rainwater harvesting, greywater reuse, and high-efficient water fixtures like showerheads, toilets, and washing machines in a dense flood-prone neighborhood with combined sewer systems? Would that help reduce flooding and combined sewer…
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Senior design project co-advised by Dr. Cruz Rios featured on Drexel News
See the whole story here: Senior Design Team Tackles Affordable Housing With Mass Timber Proposal | Drexel Engineering or read below: A team of five senior civil and architectural engineering students is working to address Philadelphia’s affordable housing shortage with a mixed-use development proposal for a long-vacant site in the city’s Hunting Park neighborhood, and…
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Dr. Cruz Rios presents at the PA Manufacturing Expo
Drexel’s CAEE was well represented at the 2026 PA Manufacturing Expo! Thanks for driving us, Arvin Ebrahimkhanlou, PhD, PE, and thanks Yaghoob (Amir) Farnam, Noelle, and Pranav for the company! Mostly, big thanks to Mohsen Bahmanyar for his amazing work on this project! This work was funded by the PA Department of Community and Economic…
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Dr. Cruz Rios organizes and mediates AEESP webinar on Integrating Sustainability into Core Engineering Courses
On behalf of the AEESP Education Committee, I’m excited with the results of our webinar: Integrating Sustainability into Core Engineering Courses! The session started with a featured presentation by Cindy Anderson introducing the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) Framework, which offers competencies and curricular resources to support sustainability integration across engineering education. The webinar also…
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Dr. Cruz Rios is awarded Longsview Fellowship for collaborative work at the intersection of circular economy and computer vision
Yay, more funding coming our way! One day, Jin Wen organized an event for junior faculty from the college of engineering and college of computing (now merged). The goal was for faculty to briefly present their research and find opportunities for collaboration. That’s when I met Feng Liu and thought “wait, what if…”. We talked…
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CIRCLE lab PhD candidate Cagla Keles presents her research at the Graduate Student Seminar
This is why I love my job! I couldn’t tell you my favorite part: help preparing the next generation of purpose-driven engineers? Getting to advise amazing PhD students and help them find and pursue their dreams? Collaborating with such a warm, welcoming, supportive group of people I get to call colleagues? I don’t know. But…
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New conference paper from CIRCLE lab PhD candidate Cagla Keles on building demolition flows
Our work has been published in the ASCE Library as part of AEI 2025: Delivering Future Ready Buildings—An Integrated Approach 🎉 Our paper, “Developing a Framework for Post-Demolition Material Flow Analysis in Urban Residential Buildings,” presents a bottom-up, archetype-based framework to quantify demolition material flows using public records, GIS, photogrammetry, and local building data (Philadelphia/Fishtown…
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New Article from CIRCLE Lab: Institutional failures and missed opportunities in hiring Native people in engineering academia
It took year-long reviews, redirections, persistence, and a lot of hard work, but I believed too much in this work to not fight for it. I’m excited to share that our paper is finally out, and I’m very proud of it! I also dream of a world where this type of work becomes unnecessary. But…
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Dr. Cruz Rios presents at the Engineering for One Planet Symposium
Happy to have presented our poster at the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) Symposium! As Drexel transitions from quarters to semesters, our team in the Department of Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering at Drexel University used this moment of curricular redesign to intentionally strengthen how sustainability and climate resilience are built across our programs. We…
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Dr. Cruz Rios presents at the Industrial Ecology Day 2025
I’m honored to be in this panel for the Industrial Ecology Day 2025: Navigating the Sustainability Job Market in Challenging Times. Students, postdocs, and early career professionals attended the event, where I talked about my career trajectory, gave advice to those interested in pursuing academic careers, and shared our work at CIRCLE lab. This event…