Sakthy Selvakumaran was awarded the inaugural Isaac Newton Trust/Newnham College Research Fellowship research fellowship, enabling her to expand her work in satellite monitoring of infrastructure.
This new five-year Fellowship is for outstanding early-career female researchers: Sakthy will use it to establish and lead a research group in remote infrastructure monitoring within the Laing O’Rourke Centre.
Sakthy is a Newnham graduate and the College is delighted to be able to welcome her as a Senior Member. Indeed, Sakthy’s research is well known to Newnham College members, as a result of her TEDx Newnham talk in 2018. LINK
Sakthy is a chartered civil engineer with nine years professional experience working in design, contracting, international development and R&D roles across various countries and project types – spanning mega-projects on the UK rail network to working on housing reconstruction following earthquakes. She is listed on the Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ Europe List, serves as an ICE President’s Apprentice (now ‘Future Leaders Scheme’) and has been appointed to the Young Professionals Panel of the National Infrastructure Commission in the UK.
In 2015, her varied and accomplished professional career led her to return to the University of Cambridge, where she received her engineering degree, to embark upon a PhD in the Laing O’Rourke Centre, supervised by the Centre’s Director Professor Campbell Middleton.
Sakthy’s PhD research explored how rapidly advancing radar satellite imagery technologies, which can detect millimetre scale changes on the earth’s surface, might transform our ability to monitor infrastructure assets, and possibly predict signs of impending failure and collapse.
This research has outlined both the opportunities and limitations of using satellite measurements and developed methodologies for translating data into useful information for asset owners. The demonstrated potential of Sakthy’s research has attracted significant interest in her post-doctoral plans to carry this research agenda forwards. The plans for her new research group are being developed in close partnership with a number of key industry players, including the Centre for Digital Built Britain, who will contribute in a variety of ways, including with substantial levels of funding.
By harnessing the power of industry-academia collaboration and fast-developing satellite based services, this promises to be an exciting and productive new programme. We look forward to reporting on the progress and advances to follow.
For details about the developing research group, please contact Sakthy at ss683@cam.ac.uk.