UTTRI associated faculty Shoshanna Saxe will receive the Engineering Medal for Young Engineer from the Ontario Professional Engineers Awards (OPEA) at the OPEA Gala on November 16, 2019.
The OPEA Gala is the province’s most prestigious and anticipated engineering event of the year. Proudly co-presented by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) and Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), this annual gala brings industry innovators, business leaders and policy makers together to celebrate and be inspired by engineering excellence and achievement. In 2019, eight awards will be received by ten awardees from industry, government and academia.
Professor Saxe’s citation for the Engineering Medal – Young Engineer award is shown below.
Dr. Shoshanna Saxe’s research examines the societal impact of infrastructure, with a focus on environmental sustainability. Her main expertise is in life cycle greenhouse gas evaluation of horizontal infrastructure (roads, rail, pipes), including the impacts of construction, operation, travel behaviour and interactions with land use. A civil engineer by training, she was a consulting engineer for Arup Toronto, where she worked on the design and construction of four Toronto subway stations and the Billy Bishop Airport Tunnel. During this time, she co-created iBorehole, an Apple app for geotechnical borehole logging.
After returning to academia to work on her PhD, Saxe conducted a detailed analysis of the London Underground’s Jubilee Line Extension and Toronto’s Sheppard Subway. She gathered data on the greenhouse gases produced during construction and operation of the line, and saved from travel and land use change, to calculate the GHG payback period for rail construction. The work highlights the environmental implications of infrastructure construction and the need for significant changes in planning, construction and management of infrastructure to meet sustainability commitments. It has also led to ongoing discussion with the provincial government on how to quantify the sustainability of infrastructure. Saxe developed the new University of Toronto graduate class “Large Scale Infrastructure Page 6 of 7 and Sustainability,” which explores what sustainability means in the context of infrastructure development, examines infrastructure needs and sustainability at the global and project scale, and provides students with the necessary tools to have an impact on infrastructure sustainability.