Our closing speaker, Dr. Aftab Mufti is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is also the Program Leader and President of ISIS Canada, a Network of Centres of Excellence, and President of ISHMII (International Society for Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructures).
The title of Dr. Mufti’s presentation is "Getting Bridges to Talk."
He was one of the key persons to initiate interest in the uses of Advanced Composite Materials (ACM) for Civil Engineering structures in Canada through his founding work as Chair (1989 to 1993) of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE) Technical Committee on the use of ACM in Bridges and Structures. With support from Industry, Science and Technology Canada and External Affairs Canada, and working through the auspices of the CSCE, Dr. Mufti was the leader of fact-finding missions to Europe in 1990 and Japan in 1992. These visits resulted in two CSCE publications, the first of their kind, on the state-of-the-art of ACM in Civil Engineering structures. In July 1993, with support from External Affairs Canada, he organized and co-chaired a successful Canada-Japan Workshop on ACM in Bridges and Structures. He is also the founding Chair of the non-profit Advanced Composite Materials in Bridges and Structures Network of Canada (ACMBSN). This network was the foundation upon which the ISIS Canada Research Network, a Network of Centres of Excellence in Canada, was built.
Dr. Mufti’s research interests include FRPs, FOSs, FEM, bridge engineering, structural health monitoring and civionics. As author or co-author of nine books and more than 350 technical publications on Bridge Engineering, Finite Element Analysis and Computer Graphics, and an engineer of renown, he has been the recipient of many prestigious awards including those received for the steel-free bridge concept, of which he is the principal developer including the Pratley Award 1994, the Association of Consulting Engineers of Canada (ACEC) Award 1996, the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Award for Excellence in Engineering 1997, the International Road Foundation (IRF) Award for the best paper 1997, the ACI Design Award 1998, the Nova Award 2000, and the Consulting Engineers of Manitoba Award of Merit for Innovation in the Design of the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) System - Provencher Pedestrian Bridge 2003.
Dr. Mufti also received the APENS Engineering Award in 1996, the Award of Merit from the Council of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of the Province of Manitoba (APEGM) in 2005 for his contributions to the profession of engineering and education, and the international Mirko-R?s award in 2005 for outstanding lifetime achievement from EMPA in Switzerland, as well as the 2005 NSERC Synergy Award recognizing outstanding university - industry research and development partnerships. Most recently (May 2006), he received the Sanderson Award from the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering for outstanding contributions to the development and practice of structural engineering in Canada.
Dr. Mufti is also the holder of several patents on the steel-free bridge deck concept, of which he is the principal developer. In addition, he is the Chair of the Technical Subcommittee of the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code that recently completed developing code clauses to design, rehabilitate and repair structures using fibre reinforced polymers. The revised code was published in November 2006.
For a more information on our closing speaker, see Aftab Mufti's bio.
