2020 TRB Annual Meeting: Sue McNeil, 2019 Roy W. Crum Award Recipient

Named for Roy W. Crum, who served as the Board’s director from 1928 until his death in 1951, the Crum Award recognizes outstanding leadership in transportation research or research administration. Dr. Sue McNeil, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Public Policy and Administration at University of Delaware is the 2019 recipient of the Crum Award. She is recognized for her distinguished achievements in research in the areas of infrastructure asset management processes, brownfield redevelopment, and disaster response and preparation.

Dr. McNeil serves as the Civil and Environmental Engineering department chair, and is also a Core faculty member in the Disaster Research Center at University of Delaware. She is a former Director of the Disaster Science and Management graduate program and the Disaster Research Center. She has received widespread national and international recognition for her work as a pioneer in the field of infrastructure systems asset management. While at Carnegie Mellon she served at the founder and leader of the Brownfields Center. As an expert in this field, she is credited with notable work in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the Czech Republic for brownfield development.

More recently, she has become a national leader in the planning and preparation for reaction to national disasters. At the University of Delaware, she was director of the oldest research center focused on the social sciences of disaster and help lead multi-university interdisciplinary disaster research.

Dr. McNeil is a member and former chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Civil Infrastructure Systems Committee; Editor of the Journal of Infrastructure Systems; and Chair of the Council of University of Transportation Centers’ Student Award Committee.

In addition, for more than 30 years McNeil has provided uninterrupted service to TRB as a chair or member of some 25 sections, committees, panels, task forces, and advisory boards. In total her terms service exceed more than 130 years and growing. She currently serves as a member of National Cooperative Highway Research Project (NCHRP) Panel on Guidelines to Improve the Quality of Element-Level Bridge Inspection Data, the NCHRP Panel on Developing an Asset Management Plan for the Interstate Highway System, and the Transportation Research Record Advisory Board.

Dr. McNeil was chair of the committee that produced “TRB Special Report 313: Framing Surface Transportation Research for the Nation’s Future,” that recommend the development of a new national research framework that engages the public, private, academic, and nonprofit sectors and draws on the nation’s research capacity in academia, industry, and elsewhere in order to improve the productivity of U.S. expenditures on surface transportation research. She also served as a member of the committee that wrote “TRB Special Report 276: Regulation of Weights, Lengths, and Widths of Commercial Motor Vehicles,” which concluded that larger trucks should be allowed to operate on the Interstates and that a new organization should be formed to monitor for safety and cost consequences.

Her other honors include the 2018 Frank Masters Award, the 2015 Distinguished Member, and the 2011 Harland Bartholomew Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers. She also received the 2012 E.A. Trabant Award for Women’s Equity from the University of Delaware. In 2016 McNeil was recognized as a National Associate of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

McNeil received her B.Sc. in mathematics and B.E. in civil engineering from the University of Newcastle, Australia; her M.S. and Ph.D. in civil engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. She is a registered professional engineer in New Jersey.

The Transportation Research Board (TRB) 99th Annual Meeting will be held January 12–16, 2020, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, D.C. The information-packed program is expected to attract more than 13,000 transportation professionals from around the world.

All full registrants at the 99th Annual Meeting will be eligible to pick up a complimentary copy of the book, The Transportation Research Board 1920– 2020: Everyone Interested Is Invited, which chronicles the important events, people, and successes that helped make TRB what it is today.

The meeting program will cover all transportation modes, with more than 5,000 presentations in nearly 800 sessions and workshops, addressing topics of interest to policy makers, administrators, practitioners, researchers, and representatives of government, industry, and academic institutions. A number of sessions and workshops will focus on the spotlight theme for the 2020 meeting: A Century of Progress: Foundation for the Future.