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Ahmed Al-Bayati says experiences early in his career fueled his passion for construction worker safety.
Al-Bayati grew up in Iraq and earned a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering from Babylon University in 2003. After that, he worked as a civil engineer for local construction firms and for the U.S. State Department in their reconstruction efforts after the Iraq War in both Baghdad and Mosul in Iraq’s north.
“When I worked in Iraq, I worked in sewer construction, and there was very little attention to safety,” Al-Bayati said. “We had a few incidents and one fatality.”
Al-Bayati described that as a formative experience.
“It gave me a passion to improve safety,” he said. “We as engineers and designers sometimes only deal with numbers, but we should really care about those who do the construction, and we should try to improve safety as much as possible.”
To put it simply, he said, “saving lives is a very good thing.”
So, when Al-Bayati arrived at Lawrence Technological University in 2019, he approached Nabil Grace, then dean of the LTU College of Engineering, about starting a construction safety center. Grace put Al-Bayati in touch with Mark Brucki, LTU’s associate vice president of economic development, and the two got to work lining up industry partners for what became the LTU Construction Safety Research Center.
“The main idea of the center is to bring construction industry practitioners in,” Al-Bayati said. “They will tell us what kind of research we should work on. This will make our research more valid, more credible, and more likely to be implemented by industry, because they are the ones telling us what to work on and why, because they have the experience.”
Today, the Construction Safety Research Center’s industry partners include ABC Michigan, Barton Malow, CAB Engineering, Carhartt, DTE Energy, Miss Dig 811, Frank Rewold & Sons, and the cities of Southfield and Kalamazoo.
The center has already produced two major research studies that have been published in scholarly journals, laying out practical steps to get safety training and safety culture more ingrained in the everyday lives of construction workers.
“I really like the environment here at LTU,” Al-Bayati said. “I would love to continue doing my scholarly work here at LTU and supporting the university and students as much as I can.”
Thanks in part to this work, Al-Bayati was named 2024 Civil Engineer of the Year by the Michigan Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “I really appreciated this recognition from the ASCE,” he said.
He has also been named a program evaluator for civil engineering programs for the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology Inc., the national accrediting body for engineering education programs. “I’ll be doing my first evaluations of other universities’ engineering programs this year,” he said. “I think this is good for LTU, helping other programs make sure they are up to ABET requirements.”
He’s also been named a member of the national ASCE Construction Safety Committee, one of just 10 members from across the country.
Before LTU, Al-Bayati taught for two years at Western Carolina University. After arriving in the U.S. from Iraq in 2009, Al-Bayati earned a Master of Civil Engineering from East Carolina University in 2013, and then a Ph.D. in civil engineering from Western Michigan University in 2017. During his time at WMU, he also worked as safety director for the city of Kalamazoo’s Department of Public Services.
And, he says, his future lies with Lawrence Tech and the CSRC.
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