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IRIS Affiliate Marshall Shepherd Elected to National Academy of Engineering

(Athens, GA) We’re proud to announce that IRIS affiliate Dr. Marshall Shepherd has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest professional honors that can be accorded to an engineer.

Shepherd, who is Director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program in the Department of Geography and a Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor, said of the honor via his Twitter account that he is, “Honored, stunned and humbled.”

Along with Shepherd, 106 new members and 23 international members also joined the academy.

This distinction is only given to those that have contributed to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

Read more on the National Academy of Engineering Website, here.

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IRIS Affiliates Marshall Shepherd and Brian Bledsoe Speak to Planning for Storm Season

In a recent article published in UGA Today, IRIS affiliate Dr. Marshall Shepherd and Director Dr. Brian Bledsoe, spoke to the need for more resilient infrastructure in the face of massive rain events, rising sea levels, and urban sprawl.

“You think about a rubber band—a rubber band has resiliency. It snaps back,” Shepherd was quoted as saying in the article. “In this new era of new rainstorms and more intense hurricanes, we need to be thinking about more climate-resilient systems.”

IRIS’s mission is to advance the integration of natural and conventional infrastructure systems to strengthen long-term resilience to flooding, sea level rise, drought and more. With an approach that is rooted in innovative, collaborative research, Bledsoe, Shepherd and the other IRIS affiliates are working to find new ways to increase our climate-resilience.

“As engineers, we’ve been trained to look to the past in order to predict the future,” said Bledsoe. “What we have to ask when developing solutions for these problems is what the rainfall might be like in the future. What’s the urban landscape probably going to look like in the future? For hurricanes, what’s the storm surge probably going to look like in the future?”