Since the FEHRL General Assembly (FGA) in May, Ken Gavin of UCD has taken over the role of from Sylvie Proeschel of IFSTTAR, who has recently retired.
Ken has developed a research group at University College Dublin (UCD) where he is a Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering and Director of the UCD Centre for Research on Critical Infrastructure. His research is focussed on the effects of climate change on transport infrastructure and also on offshore foundation systems. Ken has been involved in a number of EU projects with FEHRL, including ASSET Road, TRA2012, TRA 2014 and was the project coordinator for the recently completed SMARTRail project, an FP7 collaborative project investigating the effect of climate change on ageing rail infrastructure. He is also the coordinator of the H2020 project Destination Rail which includes a number of FEHRL institutes as partners. The project, which started on May 1st 2015, will develop decision support tools for infrastructure managers.
His research group are currently engaged in projects with a number of industrial partners including Irish Rail, Slovenian Rail, Croatian Rail, DONG Energy, Mainstream Renewable Power (MRP) and Shell UK. Academic collaborators include University of Oxford, Imperial College, University of Texas, Austin, ETHZ, University of Zagreb and University of Twente. In 2012, Ken co-founded a specialist geotechnical engineering consultancy, GDG which has completed challenging projects across the globe.
