Martin Loosemore  |  Roger Flanagan  |  Tristram Carfrae  |  Narayan Swamy  |  V. Ramakrishnan | Ian R Thomas

Martin Loosemore

Martin is Professor of Construction Management and Associate Dean at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS) and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Building (FCIOB). Martin provides strategic advice about the development and implementation of risk and opportunity management systems to many private and public sector organisations and NGOs in Australia and Asia.

In 2002, Martin was a consultant to the Australian Royal Commission into the Building Industry, advising on international workplace reform and productivity. Recently he has also worked with Tsinghua University in China, the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG) and the Ministry of Science and Technology in China to develop a risk and opportunity management system for the 2008 Beijing Olympic games facilities. He has published many articles and four international books in risk management, crisis management, facilities management, occupational health and safety and human resource management.

In 2000 he was awarded the American Society of Civil Engineers' Engineering Management - Outstanding Journal Paper Award for peer-reviewed paper entitled "The psychology of accident prevention in the construction industry". In 2002 he was awarded the UK Literati Club Highest Commendation Award for a paper entitled "Customer focussed benchmarking in facilities management". In May 2004, he was winner of Literati award for excellence for an article entitled flexible problem solving in construction projects on the national museum of Australia project, published in the International Journal of Team Performance Management.

In March 2006, he was appointed a visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and received an International Innovation Award from the UK's Chartered Institute of Building for his work in developing and implementing an innovative risk and opportunity management system for Multiplex Facilities Management. This unique approach is documented in the recent book: Loosemore, M , Raftery, J, Reilly, C and Higgon, D (2005) Risk Management in Projects, Taylor and Francis, London.

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Roger Flanagan

Professor of Construction Management, School of Construction Management and Engineering, Engineering, University of Reading

Non-Executive Director of Skanska AB (parent company of the Skanska Group world wide) and the Halcrow Group.

Advisor to the World Economic Forum, Switzerland, for the Engineering and Construction Sector Governor's Meeting, Davos.

Member of the College of Assessors for the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Built Environment Programme.

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Tristram Carfrae

Tristram is responsible for the design of an impressive array of award winning buildings and is regarded internationally as a leading designer of sporting stadia and light weight long-span structures.

Tristram is behind the design of The Water Cube - Beijing's National Swimming Center for the 2008 Olympics. He also boasts an impressive portfolio of facilities created for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, including the RAS Exhibition Halls, the Dunc Gray Velodrome, and the Olympic Tennis Centre.

He has also helped design six structures that have won Special Awards from the Institute of Structural Engineers (IStructE) - the world's premier structural accolade. No other structural engineer has achieved this.

Tristram believes that good buildings should consume less materials, energy, time and money while at the same time providing greater amenity. He has a reputation for challenging the established way of doing things, to explore better solutions, moulding both materials and people to his vision.

He is one of six Arup Fellows (out of a global staff of 7,000). This accolade honours those who have significantly contributed to the firm's reputation for excellence in innovation and design and designates him as a leader with the role of ensuring this continues.

This year, Tristram was named as one of Australia's Top 100 most influential engineers. He was Australian Professional Engineer of the Year in 2001.

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Narayan Swamy

Professor Narayan Swamy is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sheffield, England.  Professor Swamy has been involved in teaching, research, design and consultancy for over forty five years. In all these activities he has adopted a “HOLISTIC” approach integrating material characteristics and structural performance with “DESIGN” as a total concept of civil engineering construction.  His research activities reflect this approach, and encompass a wide range of inter-related and interdependent topics concerned with concrete materials, concrete structures, their interactive performance in real environments, design and construction.  Professor Swamy has lectured extensively all over the world, especially on topics such as Technology Transfer, Holistic Design and Design for Durability, Environment and Sustainability.

Professor Swamy has had the privilege to guide and train over one hundred Doctorate students leading to the publication of over two hundred refereed papers in Journals and Conferences.  He has received many Research Awards, has edited a large number of books, and has been the Founder Editor of the Journal Cement and Concrete Composites for over 27 years.  He has extensive international research collaboration, and considers Teaching and Research to be interactive and inter-disciplinary activities.

Professor Swamy is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE), the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), the American Concrete Institute (ACI) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).  He is also a post Chairperson of the Yorkshire sections of the Concrete Society, ICE and IStructE.

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V. Ramakrishnan

Prof. V. Ramakrishnan is the Regents Distinguished Professor at the Technological University of South Dakota. He graduated with two D.I.C degrees and a Ph.D. from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London in 1960.

He has done extensive research and applications using concrete fiber composite for the past 30 years. He has been consultant to all the major fiber producers (both steel and synthetic) in U.S.A. He has authored or co-authored 3 books and more than 250 papers of which more than 10 papers were on non-destructive testing of concrete. He has done a lot of research and has field experience in using non-destructive testing techniques for evaluating concrete.

Dr. Ramakrishnan has received numerous awards including ACI/CANMET Award for his contributions in fiber reinforced Concrete and CRC Robert Phileo Award for excellence in research from the ACI.

Dr. Ramakrishnan an international consultant has been invited thrice by the Chinese government in 1987 and 1989. Third time he visited China in 1997 as consultant for a fiber distribution company. He had presented papers and lectures in Australia, Japan, U.K, Canada, all countries in Europe, India, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Trinidad, Jamaica, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, Mongolia etc.

To recognize the tremendous impact that he has made in advancing higher education and materials research and for his contributions to the state, the governor of South Dakota State proclaimed September 29, 2002, as "Dr. Venkataswamy Ramakrishnan Day".

For his substantive contributions to South Dakota School of Mines & Technology research activities in concrete technology and other areas, a new materials laboratory at the university was dedicated as Rama Materials Laboratory in April 2002.

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Ian R. Thomas

Professor Thomas is Director of the Centre for Environmental Safety and Risk Engineering (CESARE) at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.  In this role he is responsible for wide ranging research on fire safety in buildings and on risk management.  He graduated in civil engineering at Monash University in 1968 and with a PhD at the same university in 1972 (Thesis title:  Reinforced Concrete Hyperbolic Paraboloid Shell Structures).  This was followed by seven years of experience of general steelwork design, development of steel building systems and methods of design and analysis.  During this period involvements included work with the Australian Institute of Steel Construction on standardized connections and membership of several Standards Australia committees including the Crane Code sub-committee ME5/1 Structures and the Steel Structures Code Committee BD1.  From 1979 to the 1999 he was with BHP Melbourne Research Laboratories, initially concentrating on steel structures but subsequently was responsibile for projects dealing with the behaviour of structures in fire and mechanical and structural engineering in a wide range of applications.

Professor Thomas is a pioneer of the change in fire safety practice from the prescriptive approach to the performance‑based fire Safety Engineering approach.  In 2002 Professor Thomas and two colleagues won the Chapman Medal given by the Institution of Engineers, Australia, for the best paper published in 2001 in the Australian Journal of Structural Engineering and in 2004 with Dr Ian Bennetts was awarded the Jack Bono Engineering Communications Award by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (USA) for the paper published in Volumes 12 and 13 of the Journal of Fire Protection Engineering that most contributed to the advancement and application of fire protection engineering.

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