Kemal Celik, Assistant Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering, focuses on construction materials and building energy efficiency to develop sustainable and multi-functional structural materials. To this end, he conducts multiscale and interdisciplinary research.

is research interests include the characterization and development of sustainable and energy-efficient construction materials, low carbon cements, multi-functional building envelopes, enhancement of urban seawall sustainability, characterization and manufacturing of lunar regolith simulants, and development of experimentally-validated geospatial-computational-thermodynamic model for cities.

One of Celik’s notable, ongoing research projects is making cement more sustainable. His special brand of cement produced from desalination reject brine “absorbs carbon dioxide during the hardening process because its strength depends on it, and can continue to absorb carbon dioxide long after it has been mixed into the concrete, making it carbon negative,” he states. Therefore, pavements and buildings made with it could actually absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the years and help combat climate change.