Glenn Washer is a Professor at the University of Missouri – Columbia (MU). Before joining the University, Dr. Washer was with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) at the Turner Fairbank Research Center (TFHRC) where he served as the director of the FHWA Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) program. Dr. Washer has expertise in a wide variety of NDE technologies for the condition assessment of highway bridges, including ultrasonics, thermography, ground penetrating radar, radiography and the visual inspection of bridges. He has published more than sixty conference and journal papers on the development of NDE technologies and their application bridge condition assessment.
Dr. Washer is an active leader in the technical community, chairing several committees related to the condition assessment of highway bridges. Dr. Washer is the chairman of the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) Subcommittee on the Nondestructive Testing of Structures and past chair of the ASCE committee on Bridge Management, Inspection and Rehabilitation. He was awarded the George Washington University’s Flemming Award for outstanding accomplishments in applied science for his role in developing new NDE technologies for highway bridges. Dr. Washer also serves on the NASA NDE Technical Discipline Team (TDT), assisting NASA in addresses inspection challenges on space vehicles.
Dr. Washer’s current research program at MU includes the development of thermographic methods for the detection of subsurface defects in concrete, acoustic methods for detection of corrosion damage in highway bridges, and health monitoring systems for asset management. Dr. Washer’s research sponsors include U.S.D.O.T., National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), Missouri Department of Transportation, Texas Department of Transportation, New York State Department of Transportation, Tennessee Department of Transportation, and NASA.
Dr. Washer received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation (CNDE) at the Johns Hopkins University in 2001. He received a Masters degree in Structural Engineering from the University of Maryland in 1996 and his Bachelors Degree in Civil Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1990.