TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY
Personnel and Bios
The research team representing Texas A&M University (TAMU) is multi-faceted with experts from different departments of science and engineering. Prof. Dallas Little from the Department of Civil Engineering and the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) is leading the research group at TAMU. Prof. Little has more than 30 years of experience in conducting research in the area of pavement materials. Other key researchers with expertise in the area of pavement materials are Profs. Robert Lytton, Eyad Masad, Amy Epps Martin, and Rashid K. Abu Al-Rub from the Department of Civil Engineering, and Dr. Amit Bhasin from the University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Charles Glover from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Prof. Bruce Herbert from the Department of Geology and Geochemistry provide inter disciplinary support and expertise in areas related to aging of asphalt binders and geochemistry of aggregates, respectively.
Dallas N. Little, Ph.D., P.E.
Dallas N. Little is the E. B. Snead Chair Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, and Senior Research Fellow at the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI). In 1999 he received the Wootan-Trinity Career Achievement Award from TTI. He has served as principal investigator for over $20 million of research in the area of construction materials at Texas A&M. Professor Little has published extensively in the area of asphalt technology and his publications have been recognized three times by receiving the J. W. Emmons Award from AAPT. Besides his duties as professor at Texas A&M, he is active as a consultant and has consulted for over 100 companies including the U.S. Air Force; Exxon; Mobile; DuPont; Alcoa; Halliburton; Kellogg, Brown & Root; Houston Airport Systems; Denver International Airport; MainRoads of Australia; Lhoist (Brussels and Paris); H. B. Zachry; CINTRA; J. B. Abrams; and McDonald Cement, Ltd., Auckland, New Zealand. His research interests include fatigue damage of asphalt materials and the impact of fillers and surface properties of asphalt binder and aggregate on the microcrack growth and healing processes.
Robert L. Lytton, Ph.D., P.E.
Dr. Robert Lytton is F.J. Benson Chair Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, and Research Engineer at the Texas Transportation Institute. He presented the Transportation Research Board Distinguished Lecture for the year, 2000. In 2006, he received the Construction Innovation Forum NOVA Award for his work in developing and applying the analysis of ground penetrating radar signals to construction quality assurance and quality control practices. He was the Principal Investigator of the SHRP Asphalt Project A005 which resulted in the SHRP Report A-357. Recently, he developed a new method of analyzing the FHWA Seasonal Monitoring Program Time Domain Reflectometry data to produce both water content and density as they change with time using the principles of micromechanics. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator of NCHRP Project 1-41 on Models of Reflection Cracking for Hot Mix Asphalt Overlays. His research interests include characterization of performance of bituminous materials using continuum mechanics, viscoplasticity, fracture mechanics, micromechanics, electromagnetics, unsaturated flow and reliability.
Eyad Masad, Ph.D., P.E.
Dr. Masad is the E.B. Snead I Associate Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering and Associate Engineer in the Texas Transportation Institute. His areas of expertise include microstructure analysis of asphalt mixes and granular materials, asphalt rheology, constitutive modeling, and fluid flow in material microstructure.
Amit Bhasin, Ph.D.
Dr. Bhasin is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on characterization of fundamental properties of pavement materials, molecular modeling, and utilization of these properties for mechanistic modeling of moisture damage, fatigue cracking, and self healing in asphalt mixtures.
Charles Glover, Ph.D.
Dr. Charles Glover is a Professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on multicomponent solution thermodynamics and diffusion in macromolecular systems as well as physio-chemical properties of asphaltic materials. Currently he is working on modeling of aging and its influence on the mechanical properties of asphalt mixtures.
Amy Epps Martin, Ph.D., P.E.
Dr. Amy Epps Martin is an Associate Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University and an Associate Research Engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI). She received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She teaches a graduate bituminous materials course and undergraduate courses in materials of construction and principles of materials engineering for civil engineers. Her recent research focuses on characterization and performance prediction of asphalt materials including both binders and hot mix asphalt (HMA) mixtures. Currently she is utilizing advanced characterization tools to quantify the effects of aging on HMA fatigue life and to improve mix design of permeable friction course (PFC) mixtures. She was the E.B. Snead II Associate Professor 2004-2007, a Montague-Center for Teaching Excellence 2000-2001 Scholar for the College of Engineering, and a TTI/Trinity New Researcher in 2001. She was also awarded the 2001-2002 Zachry Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Civil Engineering Department. She is also active professionally in the Association of Asphalt Paving Technologists (AAPT), the International Society for Asphalt Pavements (ISAP), the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE), and Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committees.
Rashid K. Abu Al-Rub, Ph.D.
Dr. Rashid K. Abu Al-Rub is an Assistant Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Program at Texas A&M University, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Air Force Institute of Technology of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Professor Abu Al-Rub primary research field of interest is the development of multi-scale constitutive models and computational tools for predicting the damage and fracture behavior of various types of materials and structural systems that include metals and metallic alloys, concrete, asphalt, polymers, and ceramics. He is the director of the Multiresolution Computational Damage Mechanics Group at Texas A&M University. He has over 150 publications in archival journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings. He authored a book entitled “Nonlocal Continuum Damage and Plasticity: Theory and Computation,” World Scientific Publishing, 2012. He has served as the principle/co-principal investigator of more than 15 projects sponsored by various state, federal, and international agencies; he is responsible for more than $6Million. In 2007, he has been selected among nine leading scientists by the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy to design new grades of advanced high strength steels for the automotive industry. He is also a member of the NSF $5Million supported “International Institute for Multifunctional Materials for Energy Conversion.” Professor Abu Al-Rub is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Society of Engineering Science (SES), the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute, and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). He has twice been recognized by The Texas A&M University System with its student-led teaching excellence award, in 2009 and 2011. In 2010 he received the Truman R. Jones Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award and the Tenneco Meritorious Teaching Award from the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M. He is also the recipient of the 2005 Achievement Award for the outstanding teaching at Louisiana State University. In 2011, he received the Ferdinand P. Beer and E. Russell Johnston Jr. Outstanding New Mechanics Educator Award from the American Society for Engineering Education.
Bruce Herbert, Ph.D.
Dr. Bruce Herbert is Professor of Geochemistry in the Department of Geology & Geophysics at Texas A&M University. His research interests include mineral surface chemistry, organic interactions with geologic materials, and the spectroscopic characterization of surface interactions at mineral and rock surfaces.
Richard Kim, Ph.D., P.E.
Dr. Richard Kim is a Professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, & Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University. Professor Kim’s specialty areas include: characterization and performance modeling of asphaltic materials and asphalt pavement systems; condition assessment of asphalt pavements; pavement evaluation by accelerated pavement testing; and pavement preservation and rehabilitation.
Yong-Rak Kim, Ph.D.
Dr. Yong-Rak Kim is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His research interests include mechanistic characterization of pavement materials, constitutive damage modeling, pavement mechanics and structural analysis.
Rong Luo, Ph.D.
Dr. Rong Luo is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include pavement cracking mechanism, geosynthetic-reinforced pavement modeling, truck tire and pavement surface interaction, and nondestructive pavement testing. She has successfully modeled the volumetric change of expansive soils and determined the corresponding pavement responses and performance. By demonstrating the mechanism of crack development in the pavement structure over expansive soils, she has quantified the benefit of geosynthetic reinforcement for the reduction of pavement distresses caused by expansive subgrade. She also established basic guidelines for assessing the differential effects of three-dimensional tire-pavement contact stress distribution on the responses of pavement structures. Dr. Luo serves on the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Geosynthetics Committee and International Activities Committee. She was awarded the 2005 Wanda J. Schafer Graduate Scholarship and the 2007 Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship by the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS). She received the 2007 International Road Federation (IRF) Executive Leadership Fellowship and was named an IRF Executive Leadership Fellow.
