Suyun Paul Ham

Dr. Suyun Paul Ham, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is a director of the Smart Infrastructure and Testing Laboratory (SITL). Recently he received National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Honorary Membership Certificate. He finished his Ph. D. in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before that, he worked in industries for seven years as a researcher and a structural engineer on projects for more than 100 buildings and infrastructure designs. Dr. Ham’s interest area is nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring His research interests include nondestructive testing with advanced sensing where he applies mechanical and magnetic field phenomena to assess the condition of infrastructure. His secondary interests lie in material characterization and advanced machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). He performs various infrastructure damage assessment field and laboratory testing including rail structures, bridge structures, and nuclear power plants. Dr. Ham is also an expert in full-scale structural experiment testing, advanced numerical analysis, and innovative sensing development.

Dr. Ham's primary research is non-destructive evaluation, imaging, and sensing, where he applies mechanical field phenomena to assess the condition of infrastructure materials and structures. He also deployed the technology using a robotic scanning system in different fields (e.g., bridges, road, airport runway, pipe). In particular, his special topic is an integrated damage assessment for concrete structures with a fully contactless scanning system leveraging non-contact sensing. He applied the method to laboratory samples, full-scale concrete members, and field structures, such as nuclear power plants, bridge decks, and deteriorated concrete rail ties. Dr. Ham is a committee member of ASCE Structural Identification of Constructed Systems.