Dr. M. Emin Kutay is a Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His expertise encompasses a wide range of topics in transportation infrastructure evaluation and management, with a particular focus on asphalt mixture material characterization (both experimental and modeling), pavement analysis and design using mechanistic-empirical methods, pavement preservation techniques, and geotechnical engineering.
Dr. Kutay earned his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, in 2001. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Following his Ph.D., Dr. Kutay joined the Pavement Design & Performance Modeling Team at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center (TFHRC), a research facility of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). He served in various roles at TFHRC until 2008, when he transitioned to his current position at MSU.
Dr. Kutay’s contributions to pavement engineering have been widely recognized. He received the AASHTO National Competition Award for Transportation Professionalism, representing the United States in the World Road Association PIARC Prizes 2007 international competition. He was awarded the Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Research Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, from 2003 to 2005. He also received the 2008 ASCE Collingwood Prize, the 2009 ASCE Arthur M. Wellington Prize, and the Association of Asphalt Paving Technologists (AAPT) Walter J. Emmons Award for the best paper presented at the April 2008 Annual Meeting. In addition, his research group received the 2023 Transportation Research Board Annual Conference Best Poster Award from the AKP30 committee, and he received the 2015 William A. Bradley Award for Outstanding Faculty Member from the ASCE MSU Student Chapter.