Student Researcher

Thales Couto Braguim is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University under the supervision of Prof. Hani Nassif. His research is focused on the assessment of the fatigue behavior of steel bridges governed by welded joints and the calibration of the advanced weigh-in-motion (WIM) sensors. He has been working with structural engineering for the past twelve years. He obtained both bachelor and master’s degrees at Universidade de Sao Paulo. He started his career developing structural designs for various types of reinforced concrete structures. At the Rutgers Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation (RIME) group, he has been leading efforts with the RIME Group to execute several tasks under the New Jersey Department of Transportation’s (NJDOT’s) Bridge Resource Program (BRP) sponsored by the NJDOT/FHWA as well as the implementation of the advanced weigh-in-motion (WIM) under the C2SMART Tier 1 Center sponsored by USDOT/FHWA. He also participated in the Smart Roadway Testbed project on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) of the New York City DOT (NYCDOT) to develop the autonomous overweight enforcement system at urban area. Recently, he has published a paper in the Transportation Research Record named “Truck Platooning to Minimize Load- Induced Fatigue in Steel Girder Bridges”.