Jan Olek

Purdue University
Lyles School of Civil Engineering
550 Stadium Mall Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2051

Office: HAMP G221
Phone: (765) 494-5015
Email: olek@purdue.edu

Websites

Education
Ph.D., Purdue University, 1987
M.S.C.E., University of Texas at Austin, 1985
M.S.C.E., Cracow Technical University, 1976

Research Interests
Concrete material and technology, high performance concrete, supplementary cementitious materials, mixture optimization, durability of construction materials and structures, life-cycle modelings, Superpave technology, tire-pavement noise mitigation.

Selected Research Projects

• JTRP/INDOT: Investigation of Anti-Icing Chemicals and Interactions (January 2007 - December 2009)
• JTRP/INDOT: Performance Evaluation of Ultra-Thin Whitetopping Using Large-Scale APT Facility (August 2006 - March 2007)
• National Center for Asphalt Technology/FHWA (May 2006 - December 2007)
• Northwestern University/ACBM Center: Rapid-Setting, Self-Compacting Concrete (October 2006 - October 2007)
• JTRP/INDOT: Specifications for Flowable Fill (April 2006 - June 2006)
• FHWA/INDOT/JTRP: Continued Monitoring of Indiana’s SPS-9A site (October ’05 - October ’09)

Teaching Activity
CE 297 - Basic Mechanics - Statics

CE 231 - Engineering Materials - I

CE 538 - Experimental Methods in Construction Materials Research

CE 597G - Planning and Conducting Civil Engineering Research

CE 597S - Fundamentals of Steel Corrosion in Concrete

CE 597W - Fundamentals of Steel Corrosion in Concrete

CE 631 - Advanced Concrete and Aggregates

Honors & Awards

Named a Distinguished Alumni of the Cracow University of Technology, Cracow, Poland.

Invited Speaker to offer two undergraduate and two graduate workshops at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (“ITESM”), Mexico, April 2006.

Invited External examiner for the Ph.D. Committee, School of Built and Natural Environment, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK, December 2005.

Bength Frieberg Award for Best Paper by a Young Author (co-advised Narayanan Neithalath and Rolando Garcia with Jason Weiss), International Society for Concrete Pavements, August 2005.

Member, ACI Publication Committee, Elected for two-year term starting April 2005.

Invited to offer Superpave Training Course and Workshop for the Pavement Institute in Nanjing, Peoples Republic of China, April 2005.

Selected Publications

• Santhanam, M., Cohen, M.D., and Olek, J., (2006), "Differentiating Seawater and Groundwater Sulfate Attack in Portland Cement Mortars", Cement and Concrete Research, Vol. 36, No. 12, pp. 2132-2137.
• Neithalath, N., Weiss, W.J., and Olek, J., (2006), "Characterizing Enhanced Porosity Concrete using Electrical Impedance to Predict Electrical and Hydraulic Performance", Cement and Concrete Research, 36(11), pp. 2074-2085.
• Yang, Z., Weiss, W.J., and Olek, J., (2006), "Water Transport in Concrete Damaged by Tensile Loading and Freeze-Thaw Cycling", ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering, 18(3), pp. 424-434.
• Peethamparan, S., Olek, J., and Helfrich, K.E., (2006), "Evaluation of the Engineering Properties of Cement Kiln Dust (CKD) Modified Kaolinite Clay", Proceedings, the Twenty-First International Conference on Solid Waste Technology and Management, March 26-29, Philadelphia, Widener University, PA, pp. 997-1006.
• Qi, C., Weiss, W.J., Wang, H., and Olek, J., (2006), "Quantifying the Impact of Plastic Shrinkage Cracking in the Corrosion of Reinforced Concrete to Improve Service Life Prediction", Proceedings of the 6th ISCC and CANMET ACI International Symposium on Concrete Technology for Sustainable Development, September 19-22, Xi'an China, pp. 1325-1335.
• Deshpande, Y.S., and Olek, J., (2006), "Development of Rapid-Setting Self-Consolidating Concrete Using Small Size Aggregate", Proceedings of the 2nd International RILEM Symposium on Advances in Concrete through Science and Engineering, Sept. 11-13, Quebec, Canada.