Dr Boulent Imam graduated with an Honours B.Sc. degree from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. He obtained his M.Sc. in Structural Engineering with Distinction from the University of Surrey in 2002. His M.Sc. dissertation was on the probabilistic fracture assessment of the Northridge moment resisting connections and led to the publication of two papers. Dr Imam continued his studies at the same university where he successfully defended his PhD in June 2006. Dr Imam’s PhD work focused on the fatigue analysis of riveted railway bridges and was funded by EPSRC and Network Rail. He developed a general methodology for the fatigue assessment of riveted railway bridges, through finite element (FE) analysis, by concentrating on the fatigue behaviour of their primary connections.
Following the completion of his PhD in June 2006, Dr Imam continued his research as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Surrey. He expanded his experience in load modelling by investigating the effect of future load evolution scenarios on the remaining life of riveted railway bridges. Parallel to this study, he also investigated, as a continuation of his PhD work, the application of novel assessment methods for more reliable remaining fatigue life estimation of riveted bridge connections.
In November 2007, Dr Imam was appointed as a Lecturer in Civil Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences in the University of Surrey. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2013.
He has numerous publications in high impact journals and he has also presented his work in important conferences in the area of bridges. He is currently teaching Steel Design and Bridge Engineering & Management at the University of Surrey.
Specialties: Fatigue of steel bridges, bridge management, rail traffic models, climate change effects on built infrastructure, robustness of structures and transportation networks, scour of bridges, Eurocodes on steel design.
