September 23, 2025
By Cecilia Sorci

Georgia Tech graduate students are advancing crane safety research with award-winning projects that could prevent catastrophic accidents and save lives. At the 2025 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) annual conference in Anaheim, California, two graduate students from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering received top honors for their innovative work on crane dynamics and control.

Ph.D. candidate Tyler Rome and his co-authors earned the “Best Paper Award” for their work presented in the 21st International Conference on Multibody Systems, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Control (MSNDC) technical track. Their work, "Rolling Resistance Model for Forced and Unforced Systems," describes a dynamic model that predicts rolling contact and friction behavior between crane payloads and objects they may contact in their surroundings. Master’s student Will Barclay and his co-authors garnered second-place honors for the “Student Best Paper Award” for their work on "Twist Control of Payloads Suspended by Single Looping Cable," also in the MSNDC. This work describes a control method for reducing payload twist oscillations. A $750 cash prize also accompanied Barclay’s award. Both graduate students’ work is made possible thanks to the Crane Safety Research Center at Georgia Tech and financial support from the Sarah Pantip Wong Foundation.

“The vision of saving lives through the efforts of the Crane Safety Research Center rang loud and clear,” said Andrea Wang, co-founder of the Sarah Pantip Wong Foundation. “It gives us great hope and optimism for the future to see these students dedicated to creating a safer world for us all by solving real-world problems.”

The Crane Safety Research Center is made possible through a partnership with the Woodruff School and the Sarah Pantip Wong Foundation, co-founded by Wang and Henry Wong. A deadly tower crane failure during high wind conditions in downtown Seattle tragically killed the Foundation’s namesake, Sarah Pantip Wong, in 2019. Since then, Wong’s family has focused much of their efforts toward advancing improved tower crane safety for workers and the public, evolving into the establishment of the Crane Safety Research Center at Georgia Tech and the Sarah Pantip Wong Foundation.

Though based at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, the Crane Safety Research Center has collaborative connections with other academic institutions, including the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Texas at Austin. Both Wang and Wong envision university researchers connected with the Crane Safety Research Center will build on the success at the ASME IDETC-CIE to address tower crane safety gaps and prevent death and harm caused by tower crane catastrophes.

“Our family continues work through the loss of Pantip,” said Wang. “It is our hope that the Crane Safety Research Center will help ensure no other family experiences the devastation of losing a loved one due to a crane collapse.”

About the Sarah Pantip Wong Foundation

Inspired by Sarah Pantip Wong’s mantra to “leave people better than we found them,” the Sarah Pantip Wong Foundation is dedicated to creating a world where communities, families, and young women can thrive. We focus on three pillars: safer communities, stronger families, and limitless futures for young women. Though Sarah’s life was cut far too short, we leverage and support crane safety research, charitable endeavors, and strategic partnerships with organizations that equip families, young women, and communities with the tools and opportunity to flourish and prosper.