About Us
Director
Dr Alan
O'Connor
Director
Dr Eugene
O'Brien
Associate
Mr Lorcan Connolly
Dr Alan O’Connor is a Director of Research Driven Solutions and Professor in Civil Engineering at Trinity College Dublin. He has published extensively on the topic of optimal infrastructure lifecycle management. His research focuses on risk and resilience analysis of critical infrastructure, asset lifecycle performance optimisation and probabilistic safety assessment. He was coordinator of the European RAIN (Risk Analysis of Infrastructure Networks) project and the CEDR project, RE-GEN - Risk Assessment of Ageing Infrastructure.
Chartered Engineer and Fellow of Engineers Ireland (Ceng FIEI).
Chartered Engineer with Institution of Structural Engineers, London (MIStructE).
Fellow of Trinity College Dublin (FTCD).
Member of Joint Committee on Structural Safety (JCSS).
Editorial Board Member Journal of Structural Safety.
Senior Engineer
Dr Emma Sheils
Dr. Emma Sheils is a Senior Engineer at Research Driven Solutions. An accomplished researcher and structural engineer, Emma’s knowledge and expertise spans across several areas of academia and industry with experience in the areas of design and maintenance of civil infrastructure. Interests are in the fields of risk management, performance optimisation, circular economy and resource efficiency within transport infrastructure.
Emma has several published conference papers and peer reviewed journal papers in the field of optimisation, maintenance and inspection planning of structures. Emma has worked extensively in the area of bridge design with experience of preliminary design, detail design and independent check of prestressed concrete bridges as well as long span extradosed and cable bridges. Emma’s work in RDS focuses on projects that use research results to solve practical problems with a focus on risk, optimisation and sustainability of transport infrastructure.
Dr Eugene OBrien is a Director of Research Driven Solutions and Professor of Civil Engineering at University College Dublin. He has published extensively and has written books on Bridge Engineering and Reinforced Concrete Design. His research focusses on bridge health monitoring, bridge traffic loading and the conflicts between biodiversity and transport infrastructure. He has led several projects at European level, including InfraRisk, Long Life Bridges and the CEDR projects, Harmony and Ecoroads.
Editor-in-chief for Civil Engineering, of the journal, Applied Sciences.
Winner of the 2014 Champions of European Research award for Cross-modal Transportation in recognition of an outstanding lifetime contribution to research in cross-modal transport.
Senior Engineer
Dr Caitríona de Paor
Dr. Caitríona de Paor is a Senior Engineer at Research Driven Solutions and also lectures in the School of Transport and Civil Engineering in Technological University (TU) Dublin where she combines structural engineering research and teaching. Caitríona is a Chartered Engineer (CEng) with experience in asset management, structural health monitoring, risk and resilience assessments and structural analysis in the civil/structural as well as offshore industries.
She has participated in a number of commercial and European research projects including the H2020-funded GOSAFE Rail and SAFE-10-T projects, and the CEDR-funded Dirizon project. Caitríona is currently working on the CEDR-funded ICARUS project and is also a board member of the Civil Engineering Research Assocation of Ireland (CERAI).
Mr. Lorcan Connolly is an Associate at Research Driven Solutions Ltd. He is a leading expert in Structural Health Monitoring and probabilistic assessment of civil structures, having published extensively in peer reviewed journals and international conference proceedings. Lorcan has also acted as peer reviewer on the subject of risk-based asset management.
Lorcan has acted as coordinator and WP leader on various FP7 & H2020 research projects focused on Structural Health Monitoring and Risk Assessment of infrastructure including the FP7 funded SMARTRAIL and INFRARISK projects, and the Shift2Rail / H2020 GOSAFE Rail and SAFE-10-T projects. Lorcan is a Chartered Engineer and member of Engineers Ireland.
Junior Engineer
Dr Alexandra Micu
Dr. Alexandra Micu is a Junior Engineer at Research Driven Solutions Ltd, with Structures, experimental, simulation, statistical and probabilistic skills and knowledge. She holds a PhD in Traffic Loading on Long-span Bridges from University College Dublin where she proposed a novel method to collect accurate vehicle length data in congested conditions using a video monitoring system and computer vision techniques.
Dr. Micu was awarded an SFI Industry Fellowship to conduct research on continuous monitoring of bridges in operational conditions in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at UCD.
Prior to joining RDS, Dr. Micu has held a Research Fellow position in the School of Civil Engineering at Trinity College Dublin where her research has focused on researching management from the perspective of flooding outcomes and decision-making in adaptation and recovery to alleviate the consequences of flooding for the AA-Floods project. Alexandra attended and presented her research at national and international conferences and has published in international peer-reviewed journals. She has won the CERI-ITRN-2018 Conference Bridge Engineering Student Competition for her paper, ‘Estimation of traffic load effects on Forth Road bridge using camera measurements’.
