Dr. Kamal H. Khayat is the new Vernon and Maralee Jones Chair of Civil Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Khayat has also been named the director of the Center for Infrastructure Engineering Studies and the Center for Transportation Infrastructure and Safety at Missouri S&T.

“We are very pleased and honored to add Dr. Khayat to our department, thanks to the chair endowed by Vernon and Maralee Jones,” says Dr. William P. Schonberg, professor and chair of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at Missouri S&T. “Dr. Khayat brings a distinguished career of scholarly work to our campus, and we are looking forward to his leadership as we work to solve some of the nation’s big challenges.”

Khayat specializes in the development of high-performance cement-based materials for structural applications and rehabilitation projects. He focuses on self-consolidating concrete and high performance concrete behavior.

Khayat earned his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to arriving at S&T this fall, Khayat was director of the Center of Excellence on Concrete Infrastructure Engineering at the Universite de Sherbrooke in Canada. He was also head of the Integrated Research Laboratory on Materials Valorization and Innovative and Durable Structures at Sherbrooke.

During his career thus far, Khayat has authored more than 200 technical publications and has won numerous awards for his research and service, including the American Concrete Institute/Canada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology Award for Outstanding Contribution in Concrete Technology. Among the international universities he has visited as a guest professor are the Universite de Cergy-Pontoise in France and the Reykjavik University in Iceland.

Vernon and Maralee Jones endowed the chair in 2006 after making numerous contributions to Missouri S&T. Vernon Jones, who earned a degree in civil engineering from the university in 1953, is the former president of Williams, an energy and communications conglomerate in Tulsa, Okla.