During the last Annual meeting of the Association of Asphalt Paving Technologists (AAPT), the Walter J. Emmons Award for year 2022 was revealed. WRI is proud to announce that it has been given to Yogesh Kumbargeri, Jean-Pascal Planche, Jeramie J Adams, Michael D Elwardany and Gayle King, for the paper entitled “Effect of Binder Chemistry and Related Properties on Low Temperature Performance Parameters of Asphalt Binders”.

The Emmons award is one of the most prestigious in the industry. It is awarded every year since 1949, to the “best of the best” paper (in the words of the AAPT Board of Directors) presented at the annual meeting. AAPT is indeed known to have a very selective review process for paper selection, and it is already considered a significant achievement to have a paper accepted for presentation.

Due to several reasons, including the pandemic and the 100th anniversary of AAPT last year, the 2022 award was recognized this year at the 101th Annual meeting of AAPT that took place in March 2025 in Reno, Nevada.

The awarded paper describes the work that has been performed at WRI in recent years, linking the chemical properties of asphalt binders to their performance. This topic is of utmost importance to the industry because it paves the way to improve current binder specifications in order to have longer lasting roads.

WRI congratulates Yogesh Kumbargeri, lead engineer with the RenuMAT group at WRI, and the team for this impressive achievement. We invite you to keep monitoring our work in this area as this is a vivid research topic for WRI and the paving industry.

From left to right: Yogesh Kumbargeri, Jean-Pascal Planche, both with WRI at the time of presenting the paper, Michael Elwardany (Florida State University) and Gayle King (GHK Consulting), received the award from current AAPT President Bill Pine. Jeramie Adams, VP of WRI’s RenuMAT group was absent from the picture.