Engineering

David Hester

Member since 2023

Occupation: Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast

I joined the UK young academy to contribute towards ensuring we have a viable world to pass on to future generations.

Bio

After graduating as a civil engineer, David 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 we were mostly making decisions based on visual data only, i.e. 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 he 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 Queens University Belfast, he has been working as an investigator on structural engineering research grants worth over £2 million.

Roles

  • IMAGINE Project Team

Interests

  • ‘Green’ energy
  • Climate change
  • Critical thinking skill development in education
  • Cross-sector skill sharing
  • Healthy lifestyle support
  • Interdisciplinary research opportunities for early career researchers
  • Misinformation and disinformation
  • Social change
  • Sustainability
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