Negin Zhalehjoo
ARRB Group
Dr Zhalehjoo is a Professional Engineer at the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB). Since she joined the pavement team within the Future Transport Infrastructure group in January 2019, her research work is focusing on the Austroads projects mainly on the fatigue characterisation of foamed bitumen stabilised pavement materials. Negin was also involved in the development of an algorithm for the back-calculation of pavement and subgrade moduli from FWD data for an Austroads project which has now been published.
Prior to joining ARRB, Negin conducted her PhD research project on the characterisation of the deformation behaviour of unbound granular materials in addition to pavement response to load and performance modelling/prediction. Furthermore, during her PhD research work, Negin conducted numerical modelling using ABAQUS (UMAT programming) to consider the nonlinear stress-dependency of resilient modulus of pavement materials.
Negin completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering and geotechnical engineering, respectively. Her master’s program involved both research projects and advanced courses where she gained in-depth knowledge and technical skills in the field of geotechnical engineering. Her master research project focused on the influence of random heterogeneity of cross-correlated soil strength parameters on the bearing capacity of foundations. She also has specialist skills in advanced numerical modelling in pavement/geotechnical engineering applications using FEM and FDM software (i.e. ABAQUS, PLAXIS, FLAC). Negin has a passion for research and the ongoing extension of pavement engineering knowledge. The outcomes of her research projects are published in journals, conference proceedings and as Austroads technical report. Her main research interests are in the area of pavement geotechnics, pavement material characterisation, pavement material stabilisation, pavement performance and evaluation, advanced laboratory experiments/management, and numerical modelling using FEM simulations.
