Summary and Reflections on the Professional Career of G. V. Loganathan

Around 9:15 a.m. on April 16, 2007, Dr. G.V. Loganathan was teaching the Advanced Hydrology course in 206 Norris Hall at Virginia Tech. He was writing on a blackboard and all students were following his class materials. Suddenly, a gunman entered and opened fire on the entire class; G.V. was one of the victims. Most of the students in that classroom were from the Environmental and Water Resources program within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and nine students were also killed.

Dr. Gobichettypalayam Vasudevan (G.V.) Loganathan was born on April 4, 1954, in Gobichettipalayam, Tamilnadu, a small village in southern India. In 1976 he completed his B.E. degree in civil engineering at Madras University and then became a research assistant in hydraulics and water resources at I.I.T. Kanpur, India where he earned his M.Tech degree in 1978. He was a research assistant in the School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University from 1978 to 1982, and he completed his Ph.D. degree in May 1982. In the fall of that year he joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he had risen to the rank of full professor by the time of his death.

G.V. was an internationally renowned researcher in the field of hydrology and water resources systems and wrote more than 150 peer-reviewed academic publications. His publications have appeared in high-impact journals, including ASCE’s Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, Journal of Irrigation Engineering, Journal of Environmental Engineering, and Journal of Surveying Engineering. He also published in Civil and Environmental Engineering Systems, Engineering Optimization, Nordic Hydrology, Operations Research, the AWRA Water Resources Bulletin, Water Resources Management, AGU’s Water Resources Research, and Water Science and Technology. The high quality of his research sponsors, which included national agencies and foundations such as the American Water Works Association Research Foundation, National Science Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey, and U.S. Agency for International Development, underscores the importance of his research. G.V.’s research activities spanned a variety of areas, including urban hydrology, best management practices (BMPs), storm-water management, drought modeling, precipitation forecasting, low-flow analysis, optimization and decision analysis, and analysis of drinking-water infrastructure. In recent years, he had also developed an interest in engineering education research.

While at Purdue from 1978 to 1982, G.V.’s research focused on the application of fundamental principles of hydrology, probability theory, and systems analysis to urban water resources problems. He was part of a team working on a research project entitled “Multilevel Approach to Urban Water Resources Systems Analysis—Application to Medium Size Communities,” sponsored by the Office of Water Research Technology of the U.S. Department of the Interior. G.V. contributed to two parts of this research program. The first was concerned with groundwater supply for urban growth; and the second, which became the subject of his Ph.D. thesis, treated the conflicting goals of land use and urban expansion and the control of the quality of urban runoff effluent.

G.V.’s first paper appeared in the IFAC Symposium on “Water and Related Land Resources Systems” held in Cleveland Ohio in May 1980. The paper, “Planning Ground Water Supply Systems for Urban Growth: A Multilevel Perspective,” was coauthored by Dr. Delleur and Stergios Dendrou (Delleur et al. 1980). Dr. Delleur still remembers going with G.V. to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio, for the oral presentation of the paper. An extended version appeared in July 1980 as Technical Report 131 of Purdue’s Water Resources Research Center. It was entitled “Planning Groundwater Supply Systems for Urban Growth: Application to West Lafayette, Indiana” and was coauthored by Professor Joseph Talavage of Industrial Engineering and Professor Jack Delleur (Loganathan et al. 1980b). These two publications dealt with the determination of the number, size, and location of wells, including the effect that new wells have on the aquifer, and the capacity and location of equalizing reservoirs and booster pumps at minimum cost for a growing urban environment. The model LANDUSE provides an estimation of the water demand and its spatial distribution. The finite-element-based optimization model WATSUP computes the piezometric levels with the input provided by LANDUSE. Based on these piezometric contours, the decision maker selects a set of feasible points to produce the set of optimal locations for the new system of wells. The model WATSUP uses a two-level coordination scheme to check the minimum pressure criterion required for fire protection and to predict the effect of new wells on the existing well system. A mixed integer program is used for the minimization of the costs.

Members of G.V.’s thesis review committee were Dr. Jack Delleur (committee chair), Dr. Talavage of Industrial Engineering, Dr. Mark H. Houck of Civil Engineering, and Dr. M. L. Kavvas of Civil Engineering. His thesis was entitled “Multiple Objective Planning of Land/Water Interface in Medium Size Cities.” It was also published as Technical Report 144 of the Purdue University Water Resources Research Center (Loganathan and Delleur 1984b), which was submitted to the Office of Water Resources and Technology of the U.S. Department of the Interior, the sponsor of the research. A shorter version appeared in the July 1984 issue of Water Resources Research under the more descriptive title, “Effects of Urbanization on Frequencies of Overflows and Pollutant Loadings from Storm Sewer Overflows: A Derived Distribution Approach” (Loganathan and Delleur 1984a). With the assumptions that the volume of the runoff, the interevent time, and the duration of runoff are independent, exponentially distributed random variables, the pollutant concentration is beta distributed, and the receiving river flow is gamma distributed during the critical period, then the distributions of the overflow volumes and of the quality of the pollutant after mixing in the receiving river were derived for a given treatment plant through flow and a storage filled by the previous storm event. The assumptions were verified for the case of West Lafayette, Indiana, and the results compared well with those of the simulation model STORM.

Soon after joining Virginia Tech, G.V. and his student Rafael Segarra extended the analysis by eliminating the assumption that the previous storm filled the available storage. This changed the analysis from one of functions of random variables to an analysis of certain stochastic processes. This led to the publication of their paper, “Planning Detention Storage for Stormwater Management,” which appeared in the October 1985 issue of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management (Loganathan et al. 1985a). After Segarra became an assistant professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, he and Loganathan further extended the research. Their paper, “Storm-Water Detention Storage Design under Random Pollutant Loading,” was published in the September/October 1992 issue of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management (Segarra-Garcia and Loganathan 1992).

G.V. began his academic career in the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department at Virginia Tech in 1982, where he served for $25\text{years}$ . During the 1980s, G.V.’s main research focus was on storm-water management, including water quality and quantity issues, BMPs, urban hydrology, and low flow analysis. In collaboration with his Ph.D. adviser, Dr. J. Delleur, G.V. analyzed the impacts of urbanization on overflows, water quality effects due to storm sewer overflows, and detention storage capacity for storm-water management. Their approach was based on a newly derived probability distribution for overflow volumes and pollutant quality in the river after untreated overflows are mixed, using hydrological relationships between independent variables such as runoff volumes and durations; this approach offered significant advantages for storm water planning. Also, this proposed analytical approach avoided extensive simulation, considering that computer capacity was very limited in the early 1980s (Loganathan and Delleur 1984a; Loganathan et al. 1985a). G.V. estimated the frequency of low flows using various probability distributions and developed new parameter estimating methods (Loganathan et al. 1985b, 1986). G.V. developed collaboration with colleagues from various disciplines to advance research in the field of hydrology and water resources. For example, with a colleague, Dr. Sherali, from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, an efficient algorithm for analyzing multiobjective optimization problems was developed. This work was published in the prestigious journal Operations Research (Loganathan and Sherali 1987). Their theory-based optimization work contributed to a global optimization approach to the design of water distribution systems (Loganathan et al. 1990; Sherali et al. 1998, 2001).

During the 1990s, G.V.’s research interests broadened to reservoir operation, drought management and forecasting, flash-flood analysis, and drinking-water infrastructure evaluation and analysis. In addition, he continued research in storm-water management and published a paper, “Sizing Storm-Water Detention Basins for Pollutant Removal,” in the Journal of Environmental Engineering (Loganathan et al. 1994). In this work, he proposed a new analytical method by formulating average detention time within a pond for a captured runoff volume. The proposed method is useful for planning-level design of detention basins to remove pollutants effectively. This paper was awarded ASCE’s Wesley W. Horner Best Paper Award for 1996.

G.V. also worked on developing an optimal reservoir operation policy using various optimization tools, and some of his publications are still classic examples of the use of linear and goal program formulations in reservoir operation (Loganathan and Battacharya 1990; Loganathan 1996). His work with his graduate student (as third author on this paper) won the Best Graduate Paper award for “Early Warning System for Drought Management Using the Palmer Drought Index” from the American Water Resources Association (AWRA) in 1997. This research analyzed the stochastic behavior of droughts using a nonhomogeneous Markov chain approach and has practical significance because it can provide timely guidance/warnings in deciding drought mitigation actions for water availability task forces (Lohani and Loganathan 1997). This work was followed by additional work on long- and short-term forecasting of droughts using the Palmer Index (Lohani et al. 1998).

During the mid-1990s, G.V. developed interest in applying optimization and mathematical theories for analyzing drinking water infrastructure. His work with a PhD student, Dr. T. J. Ahn, resulted in a publication on designing globally minimum cost for water distribution systems (Loganathan et al. 1995). G.V. also explored use of modern technologies such as GIS and GPS to solve various water resource and hydrologic problems (Greene et al. 1999; Loganathan et al. 2003)

Beginning in 2000, G.V.’s research focused heavily on drinking water infrastructure evaluation and analysis. He supervised several graduate students (Tables 1 and 2) who worked on developing decision models for addressing issues related to water main rehabilitation/repair/replacement (including trenchless technologies). This research yielded very helpful guidelines for water utility practitioners. For example, his work with a Ph.D. student, Dr. S. Park, yielded guidelines for developing optimal replacement times for water mains, which resulted in the development of pipe break prediction models and incorporated an economically sustainable optimality criterion in the decision framework (Loganathan et al. 2002). Among various appurtenances in water distribution systems, he and his student Dr. H. Jun focused on the role of valves for a system’s overall reliability and security. They considered the failure of shutoff valves and impacts by quantifying the out-of-service customers (Jun and Loganathan 2007). They also proposed a method to clearly identify the smallest subsections (called segments) for repairing pipes and containing damages (Jun et al. 2007).

As part of an ongoing National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported project, “Toward Sustainable Materials Use for Drinking Water Infrastructure” at Virginia Tech, G.V. took the lead in developing decision models for analyzing plumbing issues ranging from optimal replacement time analysis (Loganathan and Lee 2005), consumer’s preference trade-offs toward plumbing materials (Lee et al. 2006), and water hammer issues in plumbing systems. In collaboration with the interdisciplinary researchers of this project, several issues such as taste and odor of water, health, reliability, cost, and corrosion resistance of materials were addressed in decision models.

G.V. directed more than 40 graduate students and always considered his students as members of his family and spent countless hours with them discussing research problems. He was one of the most sought after research advisers in the CEE Department. Tables 1 and 2 include a list of G.V.’s Ph.D. and MS students (as primary adviser only) along with their thesis titles.

In spring 2003, the NSF published a solicitation for its Bridges for Engineering Education (BEE) program. This solicitation aimed to promote collaboration between engineering and education faculty within and outside a university to improve engineering pedagogy. A group of engineering faculty including G.V. and V. K. Lohani, the third author, collaborated with faculty from the School of Education at Virginia Tech to develop a proposal targeted to improve engineering pedagogy in the College of Engineering. The project titled “Bridges for Engineering Education–Virginia Tech (BEEVT)” supported a collaborative among engineering and education faculty at Virginia Tech. The key objectives of the BEEVT project were to (1) develop a new Technology Education Masters/Teaching Licensure option for engineering graduates; and (2) create a contemporary framework for undergraduate engineering pedagogy, beginning with freshman engineering experiences. G.V., one of the four coprincipal investigators on the BEEVT grant, was actively involved in implementing various project activities. G.V. was an active member of a team that developed a new Technology Education Masters/Licensure option for students holding a B.S. in engineering. Completion of this $14\text{-}\text{month}$ intensive program results in a Virginia teaching license for Technology Education (grades 6–12) and a masters’ degree in Curriculum and Instruction, with a concentration in Technology Education.

BEEVT investigators also explored the use of e-portfolios for monitoring students’ progress and assessment of learning outcomes. G.V. was concerned about the e-portfolio becoming just a repository of a student’s academic activities. He developed ways to employ the e-portfolio as both a teaching and learning tool. He designed an assignment that required the students to create and solve any momentum balance problem of their choice. The problem and the solution were graded for creativity, complexity, clarity, comprehensiveness, and presentation in the form of an MSWord file. As opposed to solving an assigned textbook problem, having to create and provide the solution in a comprehensive manner enabled the students to develop a strong conceptual basis for the subject matter involved. The assignment demanded more time in the formulation and solution stages than posting of finished product on e-portfolio (Knott et al. 2004).

Another important outcome of the BEEVT project was a new major NSF grant (2004–2008) funded through the Department-Level Reform (DLR) program of NSF, which sought to introduce a spiral theory-based approach to reformulate freshman engineering and bioprocess engineering programs at Virginia Tech. G.V. represented the CEE Department in the DLR program and chaired the “research experience for undergraduates” subgroup of the project. Under his leadership a number of innovative hands-on activities have been developed for the freshman engineering program at Virginia Tech. For example, in summer 2005, a “water tower” experiment was developed for a freshman engineering course to introduce simple concepts of fluid mechanics and developing empirical functions. G.V. took the responsibility to build the experiment kit in the CEE Hydraulics lab. This experiment has been successfully implemented in a freshman engineering course, Engineering Exploration EngE1024, since fall 2005.

With his strong desire to improve classroom instruction techniques, G.V. became an integral part of a faculty group that explored new and innovative strategies for classroom instruction and increasing participation of a diverse group of students in engineering. G.V. coauthored several papers that were presented at engineering education conferences, including the annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education and the international conference on engineering education (ICEE) during the past $3\text{years}$ (Lohani et al. 2006, 2005; Connor et al. 2006). The DLR project is ongoing at the time of this writing. In June 2007, the DLR investigators conducted a workshop on “Spiral Curriculum: Theory and Applications in Engineering” at the annual conference of the ASEE, held that year in Honolulu, Hawaii. This workshop was dedicated in memory of G.V.

(G.V.’s time at Purdue University is remembered fondly by those who knew him, and in particular by Dr. Jack Delleur, who served as G.V.’s mentor and adviser.)

G.V. was a somewhat bashful person, always very respectful, and a very dedicated scholar. Some of his contemporary graduate students in the Hydraulics and Systems Engineering Area at Purdue University include his friends Christopher B. Burke, B. Randall, M. Pacheco, Lindell Ormsbee, Emre Can, and Stergios Dendrou. They recall that when G.V. first arrived on campus, he purchased a powder-blue, full-length down winter coat that he wore whenever the temperature dipped below $50\text{degrees}$ . The coat was unique and became part of his personality. His wife recently said she still has the coat. He worked very closely with me and with Professor Mark H. Houck, who at the time taught water resources systems engineering at Purdue. It always was a great pleasure to meet him at the annual ASCE/EWRI conferences and to exchange season’s greetings every year. I will miss him very much.

I joined the graduate program in the Virginia Tech CEE Department in fall 2002 and was fortunate to work with Dr. Loganathan for almost $5\text{years}$ . I received my M.S. in 2004 under Dr. Loganathan’s chairmanship and continued working on my Ph.D. under his guidance. I submitted my Ph.D. dissertation proposal to my examination committee members a week before his untimely demise. Dr. Loganathan was always a very kind and smiling professor and did his best so that students could understand and apply the concepts clearly. He was truly one of the most outstanding classroom educators at Virginia Tech. His exemplary dedication to teaching was recognized through a number of prestigious teaching awards such as the Academy of Teaching Excellence W. E. Wine Award in 2006 and four Teaching Excellence Awards from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering.

Being kind and generous in teaching every student, he was also very rigorous and strict in research. His level of expectation was always very high. To me, his main motivation for research was deeply rooted in a strong desire to “make a solid contribution for the welfare of society.” His childlike but endless thirst for knowledge and wisdom was always amazing and respectful. He always had questions for everything and was not afraid to ask questions of anyone, even his own students. I clearly remember expressions of happiness and satisfaction on his face whenever he found something new or gained new knowledge. Mahatma Gandhi’s quote below perfectly characterizes Dr. Loganathan’s teaching philosophy: “A teacher who establishes rapport with the taught, becomes one with them, learns more from them than he teaches them. In this way, a true teacher regards himself as a student of his students.”

On April 16, 2007, when the terrible shooting took place in Norris Hall (room 206) around 9:15 a.m., I was in the Newman Library (around $\mathrm{1,000}\text{feet}$ from the shooting) preparing for a meeting with Dr. Loganathan that was scheduled for 1 p.m. that day. I heard several shots but never suspected that Dr. Loganathan would be a victim of this heinous crime. Dr. Loganathan was teaching his graduate class in Advanced Hydrology in Norris Hall, and four graduate students of our research group present in the class (Mr. Brian Bluhm, Mr. Matt Gwaltney, Mr. Juan Ortiz, and Mr. Waleed Shaalan) were also killed. Around noon, I got a phone call from a friend who informed me that Dr. Loganathan was shot. I rushed to the nearby local hospital where many victims were transported, but we could not find Dr. Loganathan’s name on the list of wounded who had been admitted. At 6 p.m., I heard the devastating news of Dr. Loganathan’s death from Dr. Lohani over the phone.

I met G.V. for the first time in August 1991 when I started my Ph.D. program in the CEE Department at Virginia Tech. I completed a Ph.D. in 1995 with G.V. as my major professor. G.V. was a colleague and a dear friend ever since. On April 16, I taught my freshman engineering class from 8:00 to 8:50 a.m. and returned to my office in Randolph Hall (opposite Norris Hall, where the shooting took place) around 9:05 a.m. We were instructed to remain inside the building, and my colleagues and I witnessed several police cars and emergency vehicles from the third floor windows of Randolph Hall, facing Norris Hall. My wife, a graduate student in CEE, was held up along with several other students inside another building on campus. We knew that something terrible was happening in Norris Hall, but we could not imagine its magnitude. Shortly after noon we were asked to leave campus, and my wife and I met at a prearranged location and walked to the parking lot. As we were approaching our van, we noticed an incredible number of emergency vehicles parked on the north side of campus. While I was driving home, my wife was calling various friends to check on their welfare. She called G.V.’s office and received no response and then called his wife, Usha, at home. This must have been around 12:30 p.m. Usha didn’t know anything about what was happening on campus and told my wife that she hadn’t heard from G.V. We asked her not to worry. By the time we had reached home, CNN was reporting 20-plus deaths as a result of shootings on the Virginia Tech campus. This obviously panicked both of us, and I called several friends of mine to express my concerns about G.V. We decided to take Usha to Montogomery Regional Hospital to find out about G.V. I have several good friends in Blacksburg who are physicians and I sought their assistance in trying to locate G.V. at one of the various hospitals in the area, but they were not successful. After spending about $1.5\text{hours}$ at the hospital, we decided to take Usha back to her home and I left for the Inn (i.e., on-campus hotel) where Virginia Tech officials had set up a central command center to assess the situation. Around 5:00 p.m., some friends brought Usha to the Inn and university officials broke the most devastating news to her. My last meeting with G.V. had been on April 13, 2007, when we finalized recruitment of undergraduate research students for an interdisciplinary Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site funded by the NSF.

G.V. inspired several of us and made a great contribution to the field of hydrology and water resources. He was one the best engineering educators and always kept his students’ success as his top priority. In the Virginia Tech CEE Department, several faculty and graduate students are working together to establish a library in his name. Even though he is not with us any more, his smile, humble attitude, and unselfish dedication to research and education will always be remembered. G.V. was a dear friend and colleague and will always be missed.

I received an MSCE from Virginia Tech in 1979 and was immediately concerned when I first heard the news of the on-campus shootings on April 16, 2007. I was particularly concerned when I heard it was in Norris Hall, given its proximity to Patton Hall, where the CE program is located. At the time of the shooting, I knew several faculty there (including David Kibler and Bill Cox), and in particular, G.V. Loganathan, who was my office suitemate while we both pursued our Ph.D.s at Purdue.

Based on the initial reports, it appeared that the tragedy had been limited to a German class; however, as the events unfolded, the true extent of the disaster began to become fully known. Ironically, I was teaching an 8:00 water resources class the day after the shooting when some of my students informed me that they had heard that a water resource professor at Virginia Tech had been among those killed. My heart sank when I heard the news. With hesitation, I asked if they had heard a name. When they struggled to pronounce G.V.’s name, my worst fears were realized and then confirmed when I went to a CNN Web site.

G.V. was an incredible researcher and teacher. He was an even better human being. He was one of the most humble and gentle persons I have ever known. Following his graduation from Purdue in 1982, we continued to stay in touch, and we typically saw each other once a year at the annual ASCE/EWRI Water Congress. I can’t ever remember having a conversation with him in which he did not break into his broad characteristic smile and laugh. Those who knew him know what I am talking about. G.V. was the type of person who was always more concerned about others than himself. During all of the time I knew him, including our days at Purdue, I never heard him say a negative word about anyone or anything. The field of water resources and the discipline of civil engineering have suffered a tragic loss. He is sorely missed. His life has inspired me to try to be a better person, a better professor, and a better engineer. In one sense, that is one way his life can be honored and cherished. Another way, perhaps, is through this special edition of the Journal of an organization that G.V. both contributed to and deeply loved. I say loved, because both ASCE and EWRI are made up of people. And above all, G.V. loved people, and in particular, he loved students—students that he nurtured like his own children—and individuals, even strangers, that he treated like his best friend.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13.

The writers would like to thank Ms. Lindy Cranwell and Dr. Mark Widdowson in the Virginia Tech CEE Department for providing the materials for this article. We would also like to thank Dr. Chris Burke, who provided additional reflections on G.V.’s life. Finally, we would like to thank both Virginia Tech and ASCE, who have helped the world know more about this incredible human being. Additional reflections on G.V.’s life can be found at http://live.asce.org/blog/1/virginia/GV%20Loganathan/.