The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Materials Academy Executive Workshop is a partnership between the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI), the University of Texas Center for Transportation Research (CTR), and the TxDOT Materials and Tests Division (MTD) and Workforce Development Division. The Materials Academy began development in 2019 and moved into its fourth year in 2023. It condenses a wide variety of relevant highway construction materials and pavement-related topics into TxDOT-specific modules presented over two weeks to selected full-time TxDOT employees with an engineering background. With consistently positive feedback from participants and leadership, the Materials Academy has now been expanded to offer a third week of live field trips to all participants.

This current training is based on a late-20th-century six-week Federal Highway Administration course, as well as a TxDOT-specific program later developed and delivered to TxDOT staff a decade ago by TTI Senior Research Fellow Jon Epps.

“These earlier trainings were so effective in providing advanced and expert knowledge to our engineers back in the early 2000s that when we started losing some of that knowledge to retirements, I started looking into how we could update and reinstate the Academy,” says Darren Hazlett, former TxDOT deputy director of the Construction Division and current CTR co-lead of the program. Coincidentally, Hazlett retired in 2017 and brought with him the idea of bringing back the Materials Academy. He joined CTR in 2018 and proposed a partnership with TTI’s Jon Epps and David Newcomb to develop and teach in the new Materials Academy. TxDOT saw the need, and the Materials Academy was reborn.

The initial project team included about 15 instructors (experts in their specialized field) from across the state’s university system, TxDOT practitioners in MTD, and TTI editorial staff. This team worked closely with the TxDOT Workforce Development Division to create the webinars, PowerPoints, and course participant guides according to TxDOT’s training and publication standards. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team even managed to use video and online classroom technology to hold a 100 percent Virtual Academy in fall 2020. The field trips to highway materials facilities, held in the third week of one course each year, have proven so successful that TxDOT recently decided to standardize the field trip week to all courses offered. 

What Does the Materials Academy Include?

Prework

Self-paced virtual webinars cover relevant TxDOT specifications for each module. 

Lecture and Laboratory Sessions

Students spend two weeks in a classroom and experience live tours and laboratory demonstrations at the TxDOT Stassney Campus, covering the following 10 module topics:

• Soils and subgrade.
• Aggregates.
• Steel, coatings, paints and pavement markings.
• Portland cement.
• Portland cement concrete.
• Asphalt and emulsions.
• Hot-mix asphalt.
• Seal coats.
• Soil stabilization.
• Pavement design.

Field Trips

During the third week, participants are introduced to industry representatives and production facilities to provide a firsthand look at processes and practices in manufacturing the most common materials used in TxDOT construction. This includes a trip to an aggregate production facility, a lime production operation, a cement manufacturer, a ready-mix concrete plant and a hot-mix asphalt plant. Classroom discussion and a presentation cover the fabrication and installation of prefabricated concrete elements. Lastly, the group visits an asphalt binder terminal. 

In Memoriam

David Newcomb, formerly the division head of the TTI Materials and Pavements Division, passed away unexpectedly in March 2024. With over four decades of experience and expertise in asphalt pavement research and education, Newcomb played a significant and pivotal role in reimplementing the TxDOT Materials Academy in 2020 and ensuring its continued success over the last four years. His knowledge, leadership and kindness will be missed.