Civil engineering Ph.D. student receives Tau Beta Pi honors

Hu “Oliver” Zhao, a civil and environmental engineering Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University, received two national honors from Tau Beta Pi. He was awarded the Tau Beta Pi Fellowship as Matthews Fellow No. 29 — one of 31 selected from 453 applicants for the 2026-27 graduate study — and named a 2026 Tau Beta Pi Laureate in the diverse achievements category.

Zhao is the first Texas A&M student to be named a laureate since 1982 and one of roughly 130 recognized in the program’s history. The Laureate Program honors students who exemplify the spirit of liberal culture in engineering colleges and demonstrate excellence beyond their technical majors in the arts, athletics, diverse achievements and service.

Zhao joined Tau Beta Pi in 2020 as an undergraduate at Auburn University and remained a member through Auburn’s Alabama Alpha Chapter. His laureate nomination was submitted by the Texas Delta Chapter at Texas A&M, where he served as chapter president during the 2024–25 academic year. He will be honored at the 2026 Convention in Tucson, Arizona, in October.

“The fellowship recognizes my research path. The laureate recognition means something broader to me,” Zhao said. “It says engineering is not only technical performance. It is also judgment, service, culture and responsibility.”

From outage costs to policy coalitions

Zhao was featured by Texas A&M Engineering in 2025 and discussed how his recovery from a traumatic brain injury influenced his doctoral research on disaster response, urban resilience and household recovery after Hurricane Beryl. The new honors come as that work advances.

“After the first study, I became more interested in a different question. Not only how much outages cost people, but what kinds of resilience policies people are actually willing to support,” Zhao said. “A community may agree that the grid needs to be stronger, but that does not mean everyone supports the same solution.”

Under Dr. Ali Mostafavi in the UrbanResilience.AI Lab, Zhao researches public views on power grid resilience policies for the Grid Resilience Attitudes, Coalitions, and Equity (GRACE) project. The study uses a survey of 873 Houston households, conducted by Texas A&M after the May 2024 derecho — a widespread, long-lived windstorm — and Hurricane Beryl in July 2024.

Instead of supporting a single grid resilience idea, the study views resilience policies as various distinct tools. It explores how public perceptions of vulnerability affect support for different policies such as generator subsidies, tax breaks, community batteries, fast grid upgrades, energy taxes and emergency delivery of food and water.

“This project is about the policy side of resilience,” Zhao said. “Engineers can design stronger infrastructure, but public support determines which solutions can actually move forward. A technically sound policy may still fail if it does not match how residents perceive risk, fairness and responsibility.”

The goal is to produce findings that can inform utility regulators, emergency-management planners and state policymakers as they weigh future investments in grid reliability and disaster preparedness.

“Outages are not only technical events. They affect water access, medical access, food access, communication and household stability,” Zhao said. “If we want resilience policy to work, we have to understand how people experience these failures and which policies they see as fair, practical and urgent.”

Service and leadership

Zhao’s involvement with Tau Beta Pi includes serving as Texas Delta Chapter president and a voting delegate at the 2024 convention, writing the “Exploring Life & Engineering with Hu” column in the organizational publication The Bent, and authoring the June 2025 cover feature article for The Bulletin. He served as an associate editor and is currently the vice president of the Texas A&M chapter of Chi Epsilon. He also held leadership roles in the Graduate Student Consulting Club and International Student Association.

Zhao’s leadership experience has shaped how he approaches engineering systems.

“A student chapter is also a system,” he said. “It has people, constraints, communication failures, traditions and moments when someone has to keep the structure running. That experience made me think about leadership in a more practical way.”

As he continues pursuing his Ph.D., he hopes to keep linking civil engineering research to the policy and human questions that arise when infrastructure fails.