Alumni PhD Students

Dr Ahmed Abed is an expert in design and analysis of warm mix asphalt mixtures and the structural design of asphalt pavements. 
He holds a bachelor's degree in the field of highway and transportation engineering (2004); he also holds a master's degree in the same field (2013). In 2015, he was awarded a PhD scholarship by the High Committee for Education Development (HCED) in Iraq; he completed his PhD in the University of Nottingham / United Kingdom. His PhD research focused on understanding the mechanism, behavior, and the influnce of warm mix asphalt additives on conventional asphalt. His research also investigated the effects of incorporating reclaimed asphalt with warm mix asphalt to maximise the economic and environmental benefits of these technologies.

Dr Ahmed is also interested in other asphalt related topics such as failure probability of asphalt pavements, uncertainty in asphalt design and analysis. In 2019, his paper (Probabilistic Prediction of Asphalt Pavement Performance) was selected as the best post graduate student paper in the University of Nottingham.

Imtiaz Ahmed is currently serving as a Lecturer at the Mirpur University of Science & Technology (MUST), Mirpur AK, Pakistan. After completing his early education from his hometown, Jhelum Pakistan, Imtiaz passed BSc Civil Engineering from the University of Engineering & Technology (UET) Taxila, Pakistan in 2011 and MSc in Civil Engineering with specialization in Transportation Engineering from the Taxila Institute of Transportation Engineering (TITE), University of Engineering & Technology (UET) Taxila, Pakistan in 2014. The title of Ahmed’s master thesis was “Influence of conventional modifiers on stiffness behaviour of weak sub grade soil”. 

Dr Ahmed has been awarded a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Nottingham (UK) (2020), where he has graduated with a thesis titled " Design of Heavy-duty pavements incorporating a granular interlayer". Research interest includes the pavement materials, inverted pavement and predicting pavement performance.

Dr Harith Ajam is a lecturer at the University of Babylon, Babel, Iraq. Harith holds BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Babylon, Babel, Iraq (1995) and MSc degree in Highway and Airport Engineering from the University of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq (2000) with dissertation entitled “Development of an Expert System to Investigate the Problems of Failure in Flexible Pavement”.

Dr Harith Ajam has been awarded a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Nottingham (UK) (2019), where he has graduated with a thesis titled " Effect of Heating Energy, Steel Fibres, Bitumen Types and Ageing on the Self-Healing Phenomena in Hot Mix Asphalt ". Research interest includes the development of more sustainable pavement materials especially self-healing and utilization of wastes.

Dr Ana Jimenez del Barco Carrion graduated from The University of Nottingham and received her PhD in Civil Engineering in 2017. She developed her PhD in NTEC as a Marie Curie Fellow within the EU project SUP&R ITN (Sustainable Pavements and Railways Innovative Training Network). Previously, she had obtained her MSc in Structural Engineering and BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Granada (Spain), where she also worked as a Researcher in the LabIC group. After obtaining her PhD, she joined NTEC as a Research Associate, where is currently carrying out research, academic and management tasks.

 Her main research area is the development of alternative materials for pavement engineering, having special interest in waste recycling and bio-based materials. Her PhD was focused on the laboratory assessment of such materials, working deeply in materials engineering. In particular, she studied the use of high recycled asphalt rates and replacement of bitumen with renewable bio-binders. After that, her post-doc now concentrates on the sustainability assessment of innovative technologies and life cycle management in pavement engineering, working in different international projects (BioRePavation, SMARTI ETN, PavementLCM). In addition, she is currently the project manager of SMARTI ETN, an EU funded project including 8 partners from academia and industry and 15 students aiming at developing a new generation of professionals ready to work towards sustainable, multi-functional, automated and resilient transport infrastructures. In addition to these, she is also involved in MSc and PhD student supervision and proposal writing.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ana-jim%C3%A9nez-del-barco-carri%C3%B3n-18b440b3/

Dr. Helena Lacalle Jiménez -Senior Engineer at Pavement Desing and Asset Management team in AECOM

Helena joined AECOM’s Pavement design & Asset Management team in Nottingham in April 2014 as a research Engineer. She was involved in the SUP&R ITN project, funded by the European commission. This project aimed to form a new generation of multidisciplinary researchers capable of conceiving, planning and executing sustainable pavement and railway infrastructure. She obtained her PhD in Civil Engineering in 2017, at The University of Nottingham. Helena developed her skills in paving materials, focused in cold recycling, and pavement design, focusing on airfields. Helena has participated in several conferences and workshops as dissemination of research outcomes was one of the objectives of the project.

Whilst working with the Pavement design & Asset Management team, Helena has  gained valuable knowledge and experience in materials characterisation, technical and scientific reporting and pavement design. She has experience in Highways projects: design, specification, construction and quality control. She is also proficient with the use of advance testing equipment for bituminous materials. 

Dr. Mario Manosalvas–Paredes works as a Principal Consultant for Pavement Testing Services Limited in Sheffield, UK. Dr. Manosalvas–Paredes obtained his BEng in Civil Engineering in Ecuador and his MEng in Civil Engineer in Spain. Mario was awarded with one of the projects of the SMARTI ETN Training Program for Early-Stage Researchers funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 under the Marie Curie-Skłodowska actions where he managed to validate for the first time ever the use of piezoelectric membranes as sensing devices in real pavement engineering applications. During his time at University of Nottingham Mario managed to collaborate with well-known research centres in Europe and USA. Mario was a Visiting Scholar at Michigan State University where he worked with Dr. Nizar Lajnef and Professor Karim Chatti for over a year in the developing of his project. Mario holds nearly ten years of experience within the field of pavement engineering and has provided pavement engineering services for private corporations, governmental agencies and academic institutions. 

Dr. Manosalvas–Paredes research interests are within pavement material’s characterization, performance modelling, pavement management systems, pavement maintenance and rehabilitation, smart low-cost sensing technology and big data analysis.

Haneen has a PhD in civil engineering from the university of Nottingham in 2018. She is from Iraq and she completed her BSc and MSc in civil engineering from the university of Baghdad. She worked on different subjects in civil engineering and mainly she is interesting in concrete technology, concrete pavement design and analysis, materials technology and structure.

During her study for the PhD degree in the university of Nottingham, Haneen had many activities such as working as a mentor in the Centre of English Language Education (CELE), a sounding aboard representative of postgraduate research for engineering and a president of Iraqi society in the university of Nottingham for two years. Also, she worked as postgraduate demonstrator in the faculty of engineering. She is now doing more research and prepare research papers as a part from her thesis. She published three conference papers and submitted two journal papers in the area of concrete pavements.

Dr Van Bich Nguyen is currently working as a senior lecturer at the National University of Civil Engineering (NUCE), Hanoi, Vietnam. His main research interests lie in design and analysis of pavements, asphaltic materials for pavements, and pavement performance prediction including permanent deformation, fatigue cracking and surface deterioration.

Van Bich graduated from the NUCE, Vietnam in 2007 with a unique excellent BSc degree of the Bridges and Roads Faculty. In 2012, he was awarded a MSc scholarship by government of Vietnam (322 project), and completed his MSc in transportation in 2013 at the University of Nottingham, the United Kingdom. In 2017, he obtained a PhD scholarship awarded by government of Vietnam (911 project). After that, at the University of Nottingham he undertook a PhD in Civil Engineering under the supervision of Dr Nick Thom, and graduated in 2020. His PhD thesis title is “Design of Pavements Incorporating Polymer Modified Asphalt”.

Dr Van Bich Nguyen is also interested in other areas such as bituminous binders and mixtures using polymer modified asphalt, micro-structural and mechanical property characterisation of asphalt mixtures, and modelling of asphalt mixture performance

Dr Federico Perrotta is Chartered Civil Engineer with the Italian Council of Engineers Sect.  A of Reggio Emilia and he is currently working for AECOM Ltd in Strategic Consultancy, in Nottingham. Dr Federico Perrotta obtained both his BSc and MSc degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Parma, in Italy.  After that, Federico was awarded with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie scholarship to conduct his PhD studies at the Universty of Nottingham, in NTEC (the Nottingham Transportation Engineering Centre). This scholarship was part of the TRUSS ITN project, which was funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 programme.

In NTEC, Federico focused on assessing the impact of road surface characteristics on truck fleet fuel consumption through a Big Data approach. The promising results seem to indicate that further development of the method developed by Federico could help reducing the uncertainties left by the studies conducted in the past and allow future implementation of these estimates in the framework of Pavement Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA). This will help National Road Authorities to optimise their current road maintenance strategies in consideration of the extra direct and indirect costs that this can generate to society and possibly reduce the impact that utilisation of the road infrastructure has on air quality and the environment. In lieu of the developed method and brilliant results obtained with his research conduced in Nottingham, Federico received an award at the Transportation Research Arena (TRA) 2018 for the 3rd best most innovative idea in Road Transport, within Europe.