Maintenance, Safety, Risk, Management and Life-Cycle Performance of Bridges

Nigel Powers is currently the Project Director – North Western Projects for VicRoads and leads the delivery of approximately $1B AUD of major road construction projects in the North and West of the state of Victoria. He has over 17 years’ experience with bridges and structures and has fulfilled various roles including the planning, design, construction, maintenance and operation of bridges and other road structures. Nigel has a passion for bridges which has led to roles on the Austroads Bridge Task Force and the Standards Australia Committee reviewing AS5100 - Australian Bridge Design Code. He also has a passion for working with academia to further research in the industry which has led partnering with various Universities to undertake research on bridge maintenance, management and rehabilitation. In 2014 Nigel formed the Australian branch of IABMAS and is the founding President.

Professor Dan Frangopol is the inaugural holder of the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University. Before joining Lehigh University in 2006, he was Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is recognized as a leader in the field of life-cycle engineering of civil and marine structures. His main research interests are in the application of probabilistic concepts and methods to civil and marine engineering including structural reliability, probability-based design and optimization of buildings, bridges and naval ships, life-cycle performance maintenance, management and cost of structures and infrastructures under uncertainty, risk-based assessment and decision-making, and infrastructure sustainability and resilience to disasters. He is the Founding President of the International Associations for Bridge Maintenance and Safety (IABMAS) and Life-Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE). He is the Founding Editor of international peer-reviewed journal Structure and Infrastructure Engineering. Dr. Frangopol is the recipient of several prestigious awards from ASCE, IABSE, IASSAR, and other professional organizations, such as the OPAL Award, Newmark Medal, Alfredo Ang Award, T.Y. Lin Medal, F. R. Khan Medal, and Croes Medal (twice). He holds 4 honorary doctorates and 12 honorary professorships from major universities. He is a foreign member of the Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe, London) and the Royal Academy of Belgium, an Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy, and a Distinguished Member of ASCE.

Dr Riadh Al-Mahaidi is a Professor of Structural Engineering and Director of the Smart Structures Laboratory at Swinburne University of Technology. He also holds the position Vice President (International Engagement) at Swinburne. Prior to joining Swinburne in January 2010, he was the Head of the Structures Group at Monash University. Over the past 20 years, he focused his research and practice on life time integrity of bridges, particularly in the area of structural strength assessment and retrofitting using advanced composite materials. He was awarded the 2012 Vice Chancellor's Internationalization Award, the RW Chapman Medals in 2005 and 2010 for best journal publication in Engineers Australia Structural Journal. Prof Al-Mahaidi and his research group won the 2016 Engineers Australia Excellence Award for Innovation, Research and Development (High Commendation) for the Multi-Axis Substructure Testing (MAST) System they built at Swinburne. He was awarded the 2017 WH Warren Medal by Board of the College of Civil Engineers of Engineers Australia. Prof Al-Mahaid is a Fellow of the American Concrete Institute, Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, and a Fellow of the International Institute for FRP in Construction IIFC.

Dr Colin Caprani is a Chartered Professional Engineer (CPEng MIEAust) and Chartered Structural Engineer (CEng MIEI, MIStructE) with considerable industrial and academic experience. He has worked as a design structural engineer on a wide range of projects, including integral bridges, new-concept bridge beam development, large-scale commercial mixed-use developments, and renovation and refurbishment of listed structures. His research specializations involve highway bridge traffic loading for short- and long-span bridges; vibration serviceability of footbridges; structural reliability and statistics of extremes; and Intelligent Transportation System - infrastructure interaction. He has lectured on numerous courses in three universities