Sybil Derrible, Ph.D., F.ASCE, a leading scholar, educator, and science communicator, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Derrible is a professor in the Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Computer Science (by courtesy), a research professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy, and the director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago.
He authored the popular science book The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives (Prometheus Books, 2025) and the textbook Urban Engineering for Sustainability (MIT Press, 2019), which has been adopted in civil engineering programs around the United States and the world.
Derrible has dedicated his professional career to building a more livable, sustainable, and resilient world. Growing up in Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a 6,000-people France-owned archipelago close to Canada, he has always been fascinated by infrastructure. As a civil engineer, Derrible broke the traditional disciplinary silos by studying infrastructure as interconnected systems. His research looks at seven infrastructure systems: transportation, water, wastewater, electricity, gas, solid waste, and telecommunication, championing principles of sustainability, resilience, and livability.
He received a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2016) and the Walter L. Huber Research Prize (2023) from ASCE for “outstanding research focusing on smart, sustainable, and resilient infrastructure.” Since 2019, he has been recognized in the top 2% of researchers in his field for career and single-year impact by Elsevier.
He is a lead author on the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) Seventh Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7). He also serves as an associate editor for Scientific Reports (Nature), the Journal of Infrastructure Systems (ASCE), and Cleaner Production Letters (Elsevier), and is the chair of AMR10, the Critical Transportation Infrastructure Protection committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB).
