CAREER Award supports Wittich's work to strengthen grain bins against disasters

When people think of structural engineering perils, they tend to imagine big-city bridges, skyscrapers and the like, but rural America has key vulnerabilities that could cause major economic upheaval regionally and even nationally.

A University of Nebraska–Lincoln researcher is focusing on a specific piece of structural engineering so ubiquitous across rural America, they are barely noticed — the humble steel grain bin.

Christine Wittich, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, has received a five-year, $615,387 Faculty Early Career Development Program award grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct this research.

With her CAREER award, Wittich aims to improve the resilience of rural infrastructure and communities in the face of natural disasters such as wind storms and earthquakes. She’s also integrating an education component to encourage rural students, who are generally less likely to go into engineering as a career, to see opportunities in the field right at home.

The project is an outgrowth of Wittich’s earlier research in the wake of a derecho that hit parts of Iowa in 2020. That storm caused an estimated $11 billion in damage, making it the most damaging thunderstorm event in American history. Much of that damage came to steel grain bins, with some 57 million bushels of stored grain destroyed.