USU Engineering Professor Wins Service to the Profession Award From ASCE

Utah State University Engineering Professor David Rosenberg was recently awarded the Planning & Management Council Service to the Profession Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

“I am honored to receive this award,” Rosenberg said. “It was a surprise.”

The award is given annually to a person or group who have provided outstanding service to the profession in water resources through the institute, councils, local sections or other organizational units of ASCE.

Rosenberg currently has research to adapt Colorado River water uses to declining flow and reservoir storage, study salt lakes in Utah and Iran, sustain water conservation behavior and make results more reproducible. He was awarded for his service in setting up ECSTATIC, or Water Resources Teaching and Innovative Communication, an open-source repository of water-resources teaching materials. The repository includes course syllabi, games, problems, lecture materials, videos, interviews, code, models and other materials.

Rosenberg also led the planning and implementation of a new program by the ASCE-Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management to encourage authors to share their data, models, code and instructions so others in the scientific community can reproduce results. When a journal associate editor or a reviewer successfully uses materials to reproduce tables, figures or other results in the manuscript, the paper earns a silver badge. The paper is also published in a special collection of papers with reproducible results which is published as open-access free to the authors, while money is available. If they put all data, model, code and directions in a public repository, they earn a bronze medal. There is no gold badge.

“With this new program, we seek to change our research culture so more researchers make their products available and reproducible,” Rosenberg said. “Reproducing results accelerates science, increases impact, and closes the gap between research and practice.”

The authors are eligible to receive a new annual award for outstanding effort to make results reproducible. Associate editors and reviewers are also eligible to receive a new annual award for outstanding effort to reproduce results.