Research Scientist Hongmei Gu has recently been named as the winner of the L.J. Markwardt Award for 2022.
At the awards luncheon on June 15 of this year’s 75th Annual Forest Products Society International Conference, Hongmei received a beautiful plaque and an award check for $1,000.
“This is a total surprise to me!” said Hongmei in her acceptance speech. “I didn’t even know about the award until I heard I’d gotten it. I really, really appreciate this.”
The L.J. Markwardt Wood Engineering Award is intended to encourage research and promote knowledge of wood in the engineering field as a means of enhancing the efficient use of wood. This Award was established in 1969 by L.J. Markwardt, a Charter member of the Forest Products Society, who was for many years an Assistant Director at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, in charge of Wood Engineering Research.
The Award is presented each year to the author or authors of a technical paper published during the two calendar years prior to the award year in either the Forest Products Journal or Wood and Fiber Science that is judged to be the most outstanding research paper in the field of wood as an engineering material.
The title of Hongmei’s winning paper is “Comparison of Building Construction and Life-Cycle Cost for a High-Rise Mass Timber Building with its Concrete Alternative.” It was published in the Forest Products Journal in 2020. A link to the article is here: https://doi.org/10.13073/FPJ-D-20-00052