With rapidly changing climate and environment, and increased risk of threats such as flooding, it is critical to find new technologies to help prevent failures and collapses and increase resilience of our cities.

Sakthy Selvakumaran

Sakthy is a PhD student researching advances in Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) satellite measurement technologies to understand their relevance, utilisation and limitations to structural monitoring. 

The widespread deterioration and recent collapses of bridges, dams, tunnels and other key services have highlighted the importance of structural monitoring as a tool to aid infrastructure asset owners and managers. Sakthy's work aims to use satellite remote monitoring technologies to minimise the risk of such failures.

Sakthy says: "Predicting vulnerability of infrastructure via satellite observation gives us an opportunity to prevent the deterioration and collapse of bridges, dams, tunnels and other key services. The use of such remote technology enables us to access difficult to reach assets, and take measurements at greater frequencies than traditional visual inspections can provide, as well as gain insights which may not be collected by traditional inspection and sensor monitoring.  With rapidly changing climate and environment, and increased risk of threats such as flooding, it is critical to find new technologies to help prevent failures and collapses and increase resilience of our cities."

Sakthy graduated with an engineering degree from Cambridge in 2010. She has since worked as a civil and structural engineer in design consultancy and contracting applications across multiple roles, continents and cultures (including UK, Peru and Spain) before returning to academia to undertake her PhD. 

In January last year she was named by Forbes on its first ‘30 Under 30’ Europe list, which celebrates young leaders, inventors and entrepreneurs.

This scholarship will enable her to spend time with the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Germany. Sakthy will collaborate on a project on earth observation to predict vulnerability of buildings and infrastructure by processing imagery collected by the TerraSAR-X satellite.