Biography

Since summer of 2007 Dr. Sunil Sinha has served as Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering. 2001 through 2007, Dr. Sinha held a joint appointment as an assistant professor in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering at Penn State. He is also an adjunct professor of systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Dr. Sinha is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for research in the area of sustainable water infrastructure management system. He received an NSF International Research and Education in Engineering (IREE) Award to visit Europe and Australian research institutions for six months in the area of water infrastructure systems. He is currently supervising four Ph.D. students and seven master’s candidates. He received his Ph.D. in Civil and Systems Design Engineering in 2000 from the University of Waterloo where he also earned a master’s degree in Civil Engineering in 1997. He received a Bachelor of Engineering degree specializing in Civil Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, Bihar, India in 1986. From 1987 until 1996, Dr. Sinha was a project engineer for the Indian government’s World Bank Cell at Patna, Bihar. He was responsible for investigative planning, scheduling, qualitative and quantitative monitoring of highway and bridge construction projects that are funded by the World Bank under the civil infrastructure program. He spent a year with Liqui-Force Services Ltd., and the City of Waterloo, Ontario as a research engineer after receiving his master’s degree. Dr. Sinha’s current research activities address problems in the area of assessment technologies and decision-making methodologies for the rehabilitation of large-scale civil infrastructure systems, especially municipal water and wastewater infrastructure systems. He is currently working on seven funded research projects, totaling some $2.5 million. He is in the process of developing a sustainable water infrastructure management system. His research includes the development of an integrated water and wastewater pipe management system with recent sensor technologies and non-destructive testing tools. This research has the potential to change the utilities’ ability to rate the condition and performance of its pipeline infrastructure system and to develop a rational repair, rehabilitation and replacement program. Dr. Sinha has authored more than 70 technical publications in refereed journals, conference proceedings, and reports. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, American Society of Engineering Education, American Society of Testing Materials, Canadian Society of Civil Engineers, and the North American Society for Trenchless Technology.