Ceylan has been teaching and conducting research at ISU for 19 years. He also serves as ISU site director of the Partnership to Enhance General Aviation Safety, Accessibility and Sustainability, Federal Aviation Administration Center of Excellence for General Aviation.
He has extensive experience in pavement field investigation and forensic testing, pavement performance evaluation and modeling, mechanistic‐based pavement analysis and design concepts, nondestructive testing and health monitoring of transportation infrastructure systems, smart infrastructure/engineering materials, innovative airfield pavement engineering solutions, and engineering application of intelligent data mining and computational and artificial intelligence techniques.
Over his career, he has been involved with over 115 externally funded research projects – worth more than $20.8 million in project funds since 2002 – related to transportation infrastructure systems and pavement/geo/engineering materials. Research sponsors include the National Science Foundation, Federal Highway Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Strategic Highway Program, Portland Cement Association, and various state DOTs and highway research boards.
Ceylan has authored more than 345 peer-reviewed publications (over 400 publications) and has delivered 350+ presentations, including over 100 invited talks and several keynote lectures. He has advised and mentored over 70 graduate students, postdoctoral research associates, and research staff.
He serves as chair of the ASCE Geo-Institute (GI) Pavements Committee, chair of the newly formed ASCE Transportation and Development Institute (T&DI) Task Force Committee on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Impacts, and associate editor of ASCE’s Journal of Transportation Engineering Part B: Pavements as well as an editorial board member for eight other international journals, and is a member of more than 25 national and international committees and organizations, including the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academies of Science and Engineering, American Concrete Institute (ACI), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Ceylan has received over 20 awards and honors. Two of his most recent awards at ISU are the highly competitive and prestigious Mid-Career Achievement in Research Award and the Margaret Ellen White Graduate Faculty Award, which are great testimonies of his recognition as an outstanding researcher, mentor, and educator. He was also honored to receive the 2019 FAA PEGASAS Jimenez Faculty/Researcher Award.
Recently, Ceylan was selected to receive the 2021 ASCE James Laurie Prize “for significantly advancing transportation engineering with his career contributions in smart, sustainable, and resilient transportation infrastructure systems,” and the 2021 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Civil and Environmental Engineering Alumni Association (CEEAA) Distinguished Alumnus Award (recognizing only the best and most outstanding alumni from the CEE department at UIUC), in addition to receiving several other highly prestigious awards over the years.
He received his doctorate civil (Transportation Facilities/Pavement/Geotechnical) engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2002.
