Dr. Shen-en Chen Is A Testament To The Kindness Of Charlotte
When Shen-en Chen learned about UNC Charlotte alumni who were living through the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, he felt a strong desire to help. So, he put his civil engineering expertise to work in a way that could do the most good.
“We all saw what had happened in western North Carolina,” Chen said. “It was hearing from Emily Davis, a 2012 UNC Charlotte engineering graduate, that made it personal. She reached out because she was really trying to help her community. I thought, ‘Wow, now this about the Niner family.’”
Davis, a structural engineer, and several local residents had founded Lansing’s Bridge to Recovery, a nonprofit whose mission it is to help the residents of the mountain town of Lansing, North Carolina — and throughout Ashe County — repair or rebuild the bridges that connect their property to county highways. Washed out by the hurricane and unsupported at the time by the North Carolina Department of Transportation due to the private nature of the roads, driveways and culverts that these structures spanned, the bridges would be paid for with private funds. Davis turned to her alma mater to find solutions to help LBR reach its goals.
Human and data-based solutions
Chen’s first action was to create a bridge design course that would give undergraduate students in the William States Lee College of Engineering the opportunity to roll up their sleeves in a way that had real-life impact — and get bridges built. Thirteen students enrolled in the first cohort in January 2025 — with 17 more to come in the subsequent summer and fall semesters. “It’s a testament to the kindness of UNC Charlotte students,” he said.
“Several of the students are actually from the mountains, and they really wanted to be involved,” Chen said. “Designing a bridge was new to them; initially, some were more equipped than others to grasp the material, but over time everyone rose to the challenge.”
Three months after Helene, highways to the mountains still were not fully operational, making a student trip to the area all but impossible. Chen’s next move was collaborating with faculty colleagues and alumni from United Engineering & Consultants and Catawba Valley Engineering & Testing to develop an algorithm that puts precise information in the hands of local contracted engineers, who can apply the results to the building of additional bridges, accelerating completion.
He also connected with his campus partners in the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science in the College of Humanities & Earth and Social Sciences, with whose director, Wenwu Tang, he’d collaborated on similar disaster projects, including Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.