On May 2, 2014, James Bryce successfully defended his dissertation in Civil Engineering. His research focused on how to model the environmental impacts of infrastructure management alternatives applied to pavements. James found that by modifying infrastructure management approaches slightly, the energy consumption attributed to the lifecycle of a pavement network can be reduced significantly. By developing an approach to visualizing the interaction between the most cost effective approach and the approaches where energy consumption is minimized, James created a way for transportation agencies to make more informed decisions regarding the environmental and economic impacts of their pavement management plans.
James will begin a position as a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham (UK) in July as part of the Sustainable Pavement & Railway Initial Training Network, a project commissioned by many partner institutions throughout the European Union. The focus of his research will be to define sustainability assessment factors and current state of the art sustainable practices within the European road and rail network.
I served on James’s doctoral committee with Gerardo Flintsch (Committee Chair), Nadarajah Sivaneswaran, Christian Wernz, and Pam Murray-Tuite.
The pictures below were taken through Google Glass during James’s defense.
Ralph P Hall 