Standardization News

ASTM Board Chair Speaks at Student Events

Cesar Constantino, ASTM International’s 2022 board chair, spoke at student events in Mexico and Peru in September.

 
Cesar Constantino (center) poses with students attending the Mexican national meeting of the American Concrete Institute student chapters in September.

In early September, Constantino was keynote speaker at the Mexican national meeting of the American Concrete Institute (ACI) student chapters (ENACE-ACI, 2022) at the Northeast American University (UANE) in Saltillo, Coahulia. The meeting was sponsored by Holcim México and the leadership of UANE.

Constantino addressed more than 250 students who were representing more than 25 universities throughout Mexico. Constantino’s presentation focused on the value of ASTM standards used by the construction industry, the ASTM voluntary consensus process, and the aggregated value that an ASTM free student membership can represent for students working toward careers in the concrete construction industry. 

On Sept. 19, Constantino encouraged students to become the next generation of standards developers for the concrete industry at the “ASTM and the Future Leaders of the Concrete Industry” event held at UTEC - Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología in Barranco, Peru. Engineering faculty, along with members of the ASTM UTEC Student Chapter, hosted Constantino. Other participants included Luis A. Bedriñana, faculty advisor of the ASTM UTEC Student Chapter; Giancarlo Flores, director of the UTEC Department of Civil Engineering; and Jesica Medina, head of the quality control division of UNACEM, a cement manufacturer in Villa María del Tiiunfo, Peru.

In addition, Constantino participated as a judge in the concrete bowling ball competition, in which 37 teams participated. 

(Above) In July, with support from the Instituto del Cemento y del Concreto de Guatemala (ICCG), the ASTM Breakfast for Future Leaders in Construction was held in Antigua, Guatemala. ASTM Board Chair Cesar Constantino addressed dozens of students, discussing the value of ASTM standards used by the construction industry.
 
Notable attendees included General Director of the Institute of Cement and Concrete of Guatemala Luis Álvarez Valencia, and Xiomara Sapón Roldán, ICCG's manager of training and dissemination.

The event was held with additional virtual participation of the ASTM UTEC Student Chapter (Peru), and with other students from Latin America, via Zoom.

ASTM Concrete and Concrete Aggregates Committee Awards Annual Mather Scholarship

ASTM’s concrete and concrete aggregates committee (C09) has awarded its 2022 Katharine and

Bryant Mather Scholarship to Mahipal Kasaniya, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in civil engineering at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Kasaniya earned a B.Tech. in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai, India. He also received an M.S. degree in civil engineering from the University of New Brunswick. Kasaniya’s major is concrete materials in civil engineering. He intends to pursue a career as a research and development engineer. 

The Mather scholarship is presented each year to full-time undergraduate students completing their second/sophomore year of college, or later, or graduate students who are pursuing degrees specializing in cement or concrete materials technology or concrete construction. Each recipient receives up to $7,500 to be used for educational expenses and up to $1,500 to cover expenses to attend a C09 meeting.

The award honors Katharine and Bryant Mather, both longtime members of C09, who directed much of the knowledge they gained over their long careers to the development of standards for concrete. 

ANSI Announces 2023 Student Paper Competition Theme: Standards Supporting the U.N. SDGs

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), in conjunction with its Committee on Education (CoE) has announced its 13th annual paper competition, with submissions to reflect the 2023 theme: “Standards Supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals” (U.N. SDGs). The competition is part of a long-term effort to spread awareness among post-secondary students of the strategic significance of standards and conformance. 

The U.N. SDGs serve as a call to action for all nations to promote health, safety, and prosperity while protecting the planet by the year 2030. 

To highlight the power of standards as a tool in these worldwide efforts, the ANSI 2023 Student Paper Competition invites authors to choose one of the 17 U.N. SDGs and explore the ways in which standards play a role in achieving it, or how they could do so in the future. Papers should identify a relevant standard or multiple standards and discuss how it/they can contribute to strategies and solutions for reaching the targets set out in one of the SDGs.

The paper competition is open to students enrolled full- or part-time in associate, undergraduate, or graduate programs during the period of September 2022 to June 2023 in U.S. higher education institutions. 

All entries must meet requirements and will be reviewed by top-level experts in the standards community, including experts in government, industry, professional societies, and academic institutions. Winning papers will be published on ANSI.org and potentially in other media outlets. A cash prize of $2,000 will be given to the first place winner, and a cash prize of $1,000 will be given to the second place winner. ANSI reserves the right to award no prizes based on the determination of the judges. All entries will receive a certificate from ANSI recognizing the submission of the paper.

For full submission criteria, access the ANSI 2023 Student Paper Competition flyer. Email entries by 5:00 p.m. ET on June 2, 2023, to Lisa Rajchel, lrajchel@ansi.org. The winning papers will be announced in August 2023. 

ASTM Manager Speaks to Georgia Southern University Students

Travis Murdock, a manager in the technical committee operations department at ASTM International, presented a guest lecture to students at Georgia Southern University (GSU) in October. Murdock provided students with an overview of ASTM, its standards-development process, and its academic outreach program. Professors who are interested in having Murdock speak to their classes are encouraged to contact him directly for more information (tmurdock@astm.org; tel: +1.610.832.9826).
GSU was a recipient of a funding award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2021. 

NIST Awards Funding to Five Universities to Advance Standards Education

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has made five awards totaling nearly $500,000 to support standards education in undergraduate and graduate curricula. The disciplines supported by this year’s awards include infrastructure improvement and resilience, building information modeling, nanomaterials engineering, aerospace, robotics, and sustainability.

Since it began in 2012, NIST’s Standards Services Curricula Development Cooperative Agreement Program has received 225 applications and made 46 awards totaling nearly $3.7 million. The funding supports curricula development to integrate content on documentary standards and standardization processes into courses, modules, seminars, and learning resources, including sustainable approaches that can be replicated and built upon by other educational programs. 

This year’s award recipients are:

• University of Houston
• University of Florida
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte
• Purdue University
• Rochester Institute of Technology

Information on future and previous awards can be found on the NIST Standards Coordination Office website at standards.gov. ■