AASHTO Journal - NCDOT’s Morrison Wins AASHTOWare Prismatic Award

Pavement Design Engineer Clark Morrison (above), P.E., from the North Carolina Department of Transportation has been awarded the second-ever Prismatic Legacy Award from AASHTOWare for his volunteer service helping improve its pavement software’s functionality for state department of transportation users across the country.

[Above photo by NCDOT]

AASHTOWare, a division of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, offers a suite of transportation software products delivered through a collaborative business model with state departments of transportation across the country.

Volunteers from those state DOTs are intricately involved in the decision-making processes regarding AASHTOWare products; providing expert advice and insight that makes AASHTOWare’s software suite unique in the transportation industry.

To recognize and honor the valuable role state DOT volunteers play in its software development work, AASHTOWare created the Prismatic Legacy Award in 2023, bestowed on one volunteer across the AASHTOWare product line three times per year.

Morrison – who has volunteered his time on the AASHTOWare Pavement ME Design product for the last six years – is the current chair of the AASHTOWare Pavement ME Design task force and an active member of the AASHTO COMP 5D and several Transportation Research Board committees.

Morrison played an instrumental role in the recent release of AASHTOWare Pavement ME Design’s web version 3.0, which he says was the most rewarding experience for him while volunteering. Although he acknowledged that the three-year process of changing the software from a desktop to a web version was challenging at times, he highlighted the great job done by the task force and ARA to make it accomplishable.

Despite the challenges of managing his busy schedule at NCDOT and coordinating with the AASHTOWare task force, Morrison found his volunteer work on the Pavement ME Design task force to be more than worthwhile – helping him establish bonds with fellow state DOT engineers across the country while also giving him an opportunity to learn ever-more about pavement design.

His fellow volunteers described Morrison as a “well-known expert in the pavement engineering field and a good role model.” They also commended the strategic leadership he provided to the task force, taking the pavement ME software “to a new level” and making it accessible to all members of a state DOT through the “software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. It is evident that Clark has not only made an impact on AASHTOWare Pavement ME Design software but also on all those with whom he volunteered.

“We congratulate Morrison for his outstanding contributions, for it is the hard work of our volunteers who continue to improve our software suite for all of our users,” noted Keith Platte, director of AASHTOWare. “Volunteers play decidedly critical roles within our software development process,” added Ryan Fragapane, project manager at AASHTOWare. “They are the ones who give AASHTOWare’s suite of products a real-world edge across a wide range of state DOT engineering disciplines.”