Mahdi Seyyedan, a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the 2026 Leo Casagrande Memorial Scholarship.

Awarded by the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section (BSCES) and the ASCE Geo-Institute Boston Chapter, the scholarship recognizes an outstanding geotechnical engineering student in Massachusetts for academic achievement, leadership, and promise in the field.

Seyyedan is advised by Andrew Whittle, the Edmund K Turner Professor in Civil Engineering. His research focuses on numerical modeling of the environmentally driven behavior of partially saturated soils in a changing climate, with applications to infrastructure resilience and geohazard assessment. He is also a CEE Communication Lab Fellow, where he provides coaching sessions, group workshops, class and laboratory visits, and online resources to support CEE students and researchers.

The award is named in honor of Leo Casagrande, a distinguished geotechnical engineer, researcher, and educator who served as a faculty member at Harvard University and a research assistant at MIT.