STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: Each month, or every other month, a student will provide a 1-page illustrated abstract of the research they are currently conducting. This is a wonderful opportunity for the student, for our International Society for Concrete Pavements (ISCP) Members, and for the transferring and sharing technology/research through our concrete paving industry.
The ISCP “STUDENT RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT” for August 2026 is Jorge Olavarría Bastidas, a Ph.D. student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, U.S.A), under the advisement of Dr. Lev Khazanovich.
BIO:
Jorge Olavarría Bastidas is a Civil Engineer (Universidad Austral de Chile) pursuing his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh under Dr. Lev Khazanovich. He brings professional experience in highway engineering, pavement design, and nondestructive evaluation, paired with a strong background in engineering software development. He manages the “Pavement Engineering at Pitt” LinkedIn page https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/pitt-pavements and is also the creator of Ingeniería Elemental https://www.youtube.com/c/ingenieriaelemental, a civil-engineering education channel with more than 20,000 subscribers and almost two million total views, reflecting a sustained commitment to making rigorous engineering methods accessible to a global audience.
Bridging Nondestructive Testing, Mechanics, and Engineering Software
Jorge’s research lies at the intersection of concrete pavement mechanics, nondestructive testing, and engineering software. His most recent work develops automated, objective methods for assessing the subsurface quality of concrete pavements using ultrasonic tomography. In a study recently published in Applied Sciences, he introduced a Multi-Metric Scoring framework that transforms raw MIRA A1040 shear-wave measurements into a single 0–100 quality score by combining the Signal-to-Background Ratio, Energy Concentration Ratio, and Spatial Dispersion of the reconstructed B-scan. The approach cleanly separated sound concrete from specimens containing voids and honeycombing in both laboratory and full-scale field testing, offering a practical path to real-time construction quality acceptance without specialized interpretation expertise.
Figure 1. Distribution of composite subsurface quality score for field tests with MIRA at (a) 24 h and (b) 48 h.
This methodology is being carried into practice through MIRA Online, a web-based inspection platform that processes raw scanner files directly in the browser, performs SAFT reconstruction and automated quality scoring, and generates shareable inspection reports. In parallel, Jorge continues to advance the mechanistic-empirical design of rigid pavements and slab-on-ground systems, including neural-network surrogate models for cracking and faulting prediction, bridging finite element analysis, machine learning, and accessible design software for practicing engineers.
Figure 2. MIRA Online interface highlighting B-Scan reconstruction and subsurface quality metrics.
ISCP would like to feature a “STUDENT RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT” each month, or every other month. If you would like to nominate a student, or if you are a student and would like to nominate yourself or a colleague, please send ISCP an email to: newsletter@concretepavements.org