In Memoriam
In Memoriam: Professor Fang Zhao: The Computing in
Civil Engineering Community Loses a Great Friend
James H. Garrett Jr.
Coeditor in Chief and Thomas Lord Professor of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by Universidad Nacional De Ingenieria on 10/29/18. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.
Lucio Soibelman
Coeditor in Chief and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Carnegie Mellon Univ.
DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000111
With sadness, we inform readers that Professor Fang Zhao passed
away on December 7, 2010. At Florida International University,
Fang was the interim chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering
and deputy director of the Lehman Center for Transportation
Research. She was also an active and valuable specialty editor
of the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering in the
transportation engineering area.
Fang graduated from the Beijing Institute of Civil Engineering
and Architecture in China, and then she moved to the United
States in the mid-1980s and received her master’s and doctorate
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING IN CIVIL ENGINEERING © ASCE / MAY/JUNE 2011 / 183
J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 2011, 25(3): 183-183
degrees in civil engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in
1987 and 1991, respectively, under the direction of Professor
Mary Lou Maher. She joined Florida International University in
1992 as an assistant professor and spent the remainder of her
career at FIU. She specialized in computer applications to civil
engineering problems, with a specific focus on transportation. Her
research covered a wide range of computing topics. FIU Dean
Amir Mirmiran stated, “She was a nationally recognized expert
on GIS-T, especially on temporal GIS applications in transporta-
tion. For the last three years she led the department so ably as the
interim chair, not only maintaining its operations, but also signifi-
cantly enhancing its enrollment, degrees awarded, and research
funding, as well as obtaining ABET accreditation of its two
programs—civil and environmental.”
Fang was an amazing person who will be sorely missed by our
community. In honor of her life and her dedication to helping this
journal increase its publications in the transportation area, we dedi-
cate this issue of the Journal to our friend and colleague, Professor
Fang Zhao. We will miss you, Fang.