NEWS
NORMAN, Okla. — Two teams of University of Oklahoma students recently competed in the Texas Asphalt Pavement Association Asphalt competition.
Joshua Cunningham, a senior in the Gallogly College of Engineering and one of the team captains for the OU team, said the competition was a great learning opportunity for him.
“As a participant of the TXAPA Asphalt competition, I learned how to manage projects, engineer and manufacture asphalt to state specifications,” Cunningham said. “The leadership in OU Asphalt lab is top tier and I owe everything I have learned to the staff there.”
The teams designed, manufactured and tested a 2x2 slab of asphalt for the competition. This helps them learn about the engineering and lab work behind the country’s infrastructure.
To test the slab, it gets driven on 12 times then parked on for 10 minutes. Following the tests, the team also gets judged on a presentation about their work.
The two OU teams placed fourth and seventh in this year’s competition.
About the University of Oklahoma
Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. As the state’s flagship university, OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. OU was named the state’s highest-ranking university in U.S. News & World Report’s most recent Best Colleges list. For more information about the university, visit ou.edu.
In a rare achievement for an undergraduate student, Colby Higdon, a geology major on the paleontology track with the University of Oklahoma has published original paleontological research conducted at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History that reveals new insights into whether competition between ancient animals was responsible for their extinction.
Newly published research in Science Advances, led by Jessica Cerezo-Román, at the University of Oklahoma, documents the oldest known cremation in Africa and provides some of the earliest evidence for intentional cremation using a pyre in the world.
Three University of Oklahoma graduate students have been named winners of the 2025 Three Minute Thesis competition, which challenges participants to explain their research in three minutes to a non-specialist audience.
