David Hester
Member since 2023
I joined the UK Young Academy to contribute towards ensuring we have a viable world to pass on to future generations.
Bio
David Hester is a Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast. After graduating as a civil engineer, he worked in industry for a number of years, initially for a building contractor and subsequently as a consulting engineer and bridge inspector. As a bridge inspector, he was cognisant of the fact that companies were mostly making decisions based on visual data only, and that quantitative performance data (e.g. displacement due to a truck) was rarely recorded for logistical and technical reasons. However, David had a real interest in this, so did a PhD on bridge Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). SHM is the science of trying to infer the health of a given structure from measurements taken on that structure, with the aim of prolonging the life of the structure.
After his PhD, David was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship in SHM. Since joining Queen’s University Belfast, he has been working as an investigator on structural engineering research grants worth over £2 million.
