Biography
As Executive Director of the Center for Transportation Research Systems (CTIS), my primary responsibility is to oversee, manage, and develop the center with an annual budget of $3 million. Most transportation and geotechnical engineering research at UTEP is concentrated under CTIS. The center has eight project investigators that support close to sixty graduate and undergraduates research assistance ranging from engineering, computer science to business. At any one point, CTIS is involved in over twenty externally funded projects. I am also Research Associate Professor in Civil Engineering with over twenty years of work experience. I have been instrumental in research efforts on many projects dealing with data modeling and analysis especially in correlation analysis and modeling data uncertainty. I have experience related to analysis, design and management of pavement structures and pavement material characterization. As lead researcher on over two dozen research projects, my efforts have contributed to developing pavement performance models based on traditional and artificial intelligence, establishing algorithms that focused on uncertainty analysis for estimating the impact of construction quality on life-cycle performance of pavements, collecting and analyzing NDT data including seismic and deflection data and combing the data into integration algorithms that backcalculate layer properties from GPR, PSPA, SPA and FWD. I also have experience in developing expert systems related to pavements that combines numerical and engineering analyses with heuristic information to guide and recommend best alternatives. Most recently I have been managing the software development team at CTIS on several transportation projects to provide online tools that assist engineering in analysis, design and evaluation. I have published over 90 papers and research related reports and have presented at several national and international conferences.