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Alton and Sandra Cleveland Professorship

Whiting School of Engineering
Civil Engineering

Established in 2021 by Alton B. Cleveland, Jr. and Sandra Cleveland

ALTON (BUDDY) CLEVELAND is a 1972 graduate of Johns Hopkins with a degree in operations research and industrial engineering. After graduation he went to work for Bechtel Corporation in Gaithersburg, MD, which was involved in the engineering and construction of power generation plants. He began his career performing computerized stress analysis but ultimately moved into supporting and validating engineering software culminating in installing the division’s first computer-aided design system. This led to becoming involved in developing new software to support Bechtel’s engineering and construction activities. He was ultimately named a Bechtel Fellow in recognition of the innovative information technology solutions he created.

While at Bechtel, Buddy met his wife of 42 years, SANDY, who also worked for Bechtel. Sandy has always been his most ardent and enthusiastic supporter. They have two grown sons, Tony and Paul, and three grandchildren.

In 1991, Buddy and three of his colleagues, with enthusiastic support and encouragement from Sandy, started their own software company, Jacobus Technology. Their goal was continuing to deliver software to companies involved in the engineering, construction, and operation of industrial facilities of all types. In 1998, Jacobus was acquired by the global software company, Bentley Systems. Buddy relocated to the Bentley headquarters in Philadelphia as a senior vice president, in charge of Bentley’s global software development organization. Buddy retired as a full-time employee in 2013, but continued as a part-time consultant until 2018 when he fully retired.

It was while at Bentley that Buddy reconnected with Johns Hopkins. He shared a portfolio of projects that companies executed using Bentley software which caught the attention of Dr. Ben Shafer. After Dr. Shafer was named the chair of civil engineering he reached out to Buddy in 2010 to chair a reconstituted Industry Advisory Group and he remains involved with this group.

Sandy and Buddy now support a number of charitable organizations and share a love of music, particularly the Blues. They sponsor a number of music events each year and Buddy continues to perform with a number of blues bands in the Philadelphia area.

Held by Lauren Gardner

LAUREN GARDNER, Ph.D., is the Alton and Sandra Cleveland Professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and holds a joint appointment in the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

She is the creator of the interactive web-based dashboard being used by public health authorities, researchers, and the general public around the globe to track the outbreak of the novel coronavirus that has spread worldwide since early January 2020, infecting more than 47 million and killing more than 1.2 million people around the world. The dashboard, which debuted on January 22, 2020 continues to be cited every day by multiple major media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC News, and many others across the country and around the world. It has served as a resource for a number of federal agencies, including former U.S. vice president Mike Pence’s coronavirus task force. Since its launch, the dashboard has recorded over 200 billion feature requests, which are the number of interactions visitors have with the underlying data available on the site.

One of six Johns Hopkins experts who briefed congressional staff about the novel coronavirus outbreak during a Capitol Hill event in early March 2020, Gardner was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020 for “democratizing data” and filling “a void of public health leadership” during the pandemic.

Gardner is a specialist in modeling infectious disease risk. Her work focuses holistically on virus diffusion as a function of climate, land use, human behavior, mobility and other contributing risk factors. Along these lines, Gardner leads COVID-19 modeling efforts in partnership with U.S. cities to develop customized models to estimate COVID-19 risk at the local level, and to optimize resource allocation for surveillance and targeted testing. Her group also contributes weekly COVID-19 case and death predictions to the CDC’s ensemble forecast through the COVID-19 Forecast Hub.

Gardner has received research funding from U.S. organizations including NIH, NSF, NASA, and the CDC, as well as various Australian federal funding organizations.

She has published around 100 scholarly articles, letters, communications, and conference proceedings. Gardner is an invited member of multiple international professional committees, and reviewer for top-tier journals and grant-funding organizations. She is an invited participant of various scientific advisory committees, including the U.S. Transportation Research Board committees on Network Modeling, Transportation and Health, and Aviation Security and Emergency Management. She has supervised more than 30 students and post-docs, and teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on network modeling and transport systems at Johns Hopkins.

In addition to being named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020, Gardner was also included on BBC’s 100 Women List 2020: Women who led change; Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business for 2020; the Baltimore Sun’s 25 Women to Watch 2020; and the Baltimore Business Journal’s Best in Tech 2020. She was also a winner of the 2020 Route Fifty Navigator Award, which honors individuals and teams who, while working with or in state, county, or municipal governments, demonstrate their ability to implement a great idea that improves public sector services and the communities they serve.

Prior to joining JHU in 2019, Gardner was a senior lecturer in civil engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, in Australia.

She received her BSArchE in architectural engineering, her MSE in civil engineering, and her Ph.D. in transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

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