Two Ph.D. engineering students at Missouri University of Science and Technology have won top honors in a national competition on safety engineering and risk analysis.

Hanan Altabbakh, a Ph.D. student in engineering management, won first place in the 2012 Student Safety Innovation Challenge, sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME). Mohammad Alkazimi, a Ph.D. student in petroleum engineering and Altabbakh’s husband, won second place in the competition.

The two will be honored in Houston, Texas, Nov. 13 during ASME’s International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition.

Altabbakh’s winning paper, “Towards Quantifying the Safety Cognition in the Undergraduate Engineering Student,” examines how engineering students involved in design teams perceive the level of safety training they receive.

Alkazimi’s paper, “Environmental and Infrastructure Risk Matrices of Underwater Explosion as Oil Spill Risk Mitigation Technique,” examines the risk involved with using configured explosives to seal an underwater oil pipeline leak.

Altabbakh is also a member of the American Society of Engineering Management and the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. Alkazimi is president of Missouri S&T’s Council of Graduate Students and is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, Pi Epsilon Tau and Sigma Gamma Epsilon. He also serves on the boards of the Associated Students of the University of Missouri and S&T’s Strategic Planning Steering Committee.