CCEE’s Ashly Cabas selected for Virginia Tech Young Alumni award

CCEE Assistant Professor Ashly Cabas was selected as a 2023 Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Outstanding Young Alumni at Virginia Tech University. She will be recognized at the department’s Alumni Achievement Awards Banquet on March 23.  

“Feeling honored and privileged for the amazing opportunity to go back to my second home @VTCEE @VTEngineering,” Cabas tweeted. “This award has a very special meaning to me, and I can’t wait to celebrate it with my favorite Hokies!”

Alumni are selected based on their accomplishments and commitment to the profession of engineering and other careers, and support to the university, nation, and to society as a whole.

Cabas, who completed her undergraduate studies at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, Venezuela, earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech. Her research interests include the assessment of seismic hazards, performance-based design in geotechnical engineering, and prediction of the response of soils and foundation systems to seismic loading and dynamic soil-foundation-structure interaction. She primarily focuses on the advancement of the current understanding of the impact that local soil conditions have on ground motions, improving the assessment of site-specific seismic hazards, and elucidating the correlation between ground motion parameters and structural response and damage.

Cabas has received numerous accolades including the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s 2021 Shah Family Innovation Prize, 2021 NC State Impact Scholar, 2021 New Faces in American Society of Civil Engineering Geo-Institute, 2020 Fellow for the National Science Foundation Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards and Disasters Researchers Fellowship Program, and 2017 ASCE Excellence in Civil Engineering Education (ExCEEd) Fellow. She also serves as a Faculty Fellow of the NC State Center of Geospatial Analytics.