From November 6-8th, several members of our research group attended the first International Conference on Sustainable Infrastructure (ICSI) hosted by ASCE.

Onondaga County Executive Joanne Mahoney delivered one of the opening plenary talks on the development and success of the Save the Rain program. Though I may be biased, it was one of the most engaging talks of the morning as she described the complicated history of stormwater management planning in Syracuse, and how she played a major role in the development of a more sustainable direction. The audience of primarily engineers was very interested to hear about her extensive stakeholder engagement efforts, something that was generally absent from many public works projects of the past.

 

 

Mallory Squier presented her poster entitled “Preliminary heat transfer analysis for a large extensive green roof” which focused on recent data collected from the OnCenter green roof.

Caitlin Eger presented her paper entitled “Water Budget Triangle: A New Conceptual Framework for Comparison of Green and Gray Infrastructure.” Her talk was very interactive and involved personal drawings and calculations done by all audience members. It was very refreshing mid-way through the conference!

Overall, this was an excellent conference that I will look forward to attending again in future years. I expect it to grow as more engineers and community leaders seek to learn about the best practices related to the development of sustainable infrastructure systems.