William G. Buttlar

Associate Professor
Narbey Khachaturian Faculty Scholar

1212 Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory

Phone: (217) 333-5966

Fax: (217) 333-1924

Email: buttlar@uiuc.edu

William G. Buttlar holds a B.S. (Penn State University 1989), M.S. (Penn State University 1992), and Ph.D. (Penn State University 1996), all in civil engineering. During his graduate work he was named a FHWA Eisenhower Research Fellow, which included a two-year residency at the University of Florida. He has been on the faculty of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois since 1996. Dr. Buttlar is a licensed Professional Engineer in Illinois.

Dr. Buttlar teaches undergraduate and graduate courses and does research in pavements and transportation materials, mechanical testing and constitutive modeling of asphalt binders and mixtures, analysis and control of thermal and reflective cracking in asphalt pavement and overlays, micromechanics, finite element analysis and constitutive model development, pavement fracture, and instrumentation.

Dr. Buttlar’s research focuses on the experimental and analytical characterization of the physical properties of asphalt mixtures, particularly at low temperatures. His work as a research team member of the Strategic Highway Research Program A005 led to the development of the SUPERPAVE indirect tensile test (IDT), now required for level II and III mixture designs using SUPERPAVE. Dr. Buttlar has been involved in developing standardized test procedures for the IDT for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM).

Dr. Buttlar is a member of the Transportation Research Board and the American Society of Civil Engineers, and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Road Materials and Pavement Design. He is Director of the annual Transportation Highway and Engineering Conference, and conference chair of the annual Bituminous Paving Conference. Dr. Buttlar served on the organizing committee and was the proceedings editor and a session chair for the ASCE conference, Advancing Airfield Pavements, in 2001. He served on the technical committee and was a session chair for the FAA Airfield Technology Transfer Conference in 2002.

Dr. Buttlar has received several honors and awards for his research and teaching accomplishments. In 2001, the Canadian Technical Asphalt Association named Dr. Buttlar the recipient of the Prix Earl Kee Award for best technical presentation by new authors. In 2000, he was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences, Transportation Research Board as the recipient of the Fred Burggraf Award in recognition of a “paper of outstanding merit”. He was named the George Crawford Faculty Scholar by the Civil Engineering Department at the University of Illinois, 2001-2003. First among Dr. Buttlar’s several teaching honors is his appointment as a Collins Fellow in 2002 by the College of Engineering, Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education.