From left: Kasun Hewage, assistant professor of engineering, Sherry Sullivan, director of the Transportation and Built Environment at Cement Association of Canada, Rehan Sadiq, associate professor of engineering, and Darren Brown, director of environmental policy at the Cement Association of Canada.
Civil engineers Kasun Hewage, assistant professor, and Rehan Sadiq, associate professor, in the School of Engineering, recently returned from spearheading an NSERC-sponsored workshop that brought together industry experts and leading cement and concrete university researchers.
UBC researchers played a key role in planning the national event by preparing the academic agenda and managing the NSERC budget.
“The workshop focus was to identify sustainability challenges of the cement industry in Canada and identify collaborative research potentials between the cement companies and academia. It was the first such event with the cement industry in Canada,” said Hewage.
“It was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the state-of-the-art research we do at UBC’s Okanagan campus to the Canadian cement industry and other academic researchers. In addition, it helped us to better understand parallel research being done at other Canadian universities in similar research areas.”
There were 38 attendees including 11 academic participants from 10 universities. The attendees were divided into two major research themes, namely Energy & Environment and Materials (cement and concrete) to identify the future research needs of cement industry in Canada.
