This post is excerpted from a longer article posted on July 13, 2015, entitled, "The Art Historian-Turned-Civil Engineer Who Should've Overshadowed Tim Hunt." That lengthy post included additional backstory on the controversy over comments made by Sir Tim Hunt at a luncheon earlier on the day that he led a session promoting the work of Dr. Laefer at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea. This excerpt focuses solely on Dr. Laefer's work, a five-year project funded by the European Research Council.
University leaders often speak of the need for the humanities to interface more effectively with those in science and engineering. Scientists, informal science education, science communication and journalism are among the most obvious of those relationships. But in following last month's annual meeting of the World Conference of Science Journalists held in Seoul, South Korea, I learned of an outstanding mid-career scientist who has dug deeper, as it were, in applying academic cross-fertilization to her career.
"I decided I wanted to devote my life to saving old buildings," said Debra Laefer, PhD, an associate professor at University College Dublin. "To do that, I needed a really big toolbag. So I finished my art history degree at Columbia and stayed on and enrolled in an undergraduate civil engineering program, went through my degrees and worked in the construction industry in New York City."
Debra Laefer, PhD, in one of her research environments, shown here visiting the San Matteo water... [+]
Laefer was one of two recipients of European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Project grants who were featured to WCSJ journalist attendees in a session chaired by Sir Tim Hunt, a now-former member of the ERC Scientific Council and 2001 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine for his laboratory's discovery of cyclins, the crucial dynamic regulators of cell division.
The ERC was the first pan-European funding agency, established by the Council of the European Union in 2006 with a seven-year budget of €7.5 billion. Just last week, the ERC announced their 2015 Advanced Grant awards to 190 researchers at a total of €445 million.
In the session at WCSJ, Laefer's work was showcased with that of Jennifer Gabrys, PhD, at Goldsmith's, University of London. Drs. Laefer and Gabrys were the only two of 5,000 ERC grantees to be selected to represent the ERC to the international science journalism conference.
I was able to reach Dr. Laefer for a Skype video interview on June 11 while she was in Germany on her return trip from Seoul. Her first comments were that the WCSJ conference gave her and other scientists a rare opportunity to interact with science journalists from around the world.
"It was fantastic. It was my first experience with the world of journalism. I went to the editors' panel on how to pitch science and I learned so much." Laefer even wrote her first press release that covers her five-year, €1.5 million project: Rethinking Tunneling for Urban Neighbourhoods (RETURN). "As a scientist, I feel so ignorant about how to communicate my research with the general public and to science journalists, so I found it super helpful."
Her ERC research that she discussed in Korea is particularly timely in that the city of Dublin is about to get its first underground Metro. The first tunnels will go under historic Georgian Dublin.
"So as we put these tunnels under these reinforced masonry buildings, we cause a lot of problems," says Laefer. "How do we rethink that risk assessment?"
Laefer has been studying a 1.5 square kilometer section there and developing models to that will guide mitigation of damage to historic structures.
"We're really concerned because this is the heart of the architectural conservation district and there's not been a lot of experience tunneling in Ireland," adds Laefer. "It's not like London where you know how the clay responds and you've got tons of experience in tunneling and great soil models."
The approach that Laefer's group is taking is to first use aerial laser scanning to extract building geometries into data forms compatible with computational engineering models. The 40 billion data points must then be segregated based on whether they belong to the buildings or to surrounding areas such as roads and vehicles.
Laefer notes that while the human eye can make these distinctions, the researchers need to use Laser Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, to convert the visual attributes into data that can then feed into subsequent computations that incorporate the material properties of each data point. The approach even considers the effect of parts of the facade, such as the lintels that support the masonry over windows and entranceways, in their measures of building stiffness.
This study site includes where the tunnel boring machinery will first be started, where they first dig the hole and sink the equipment, as well as the first two metro stops. "We now have condition assessments for 450 structures," says Laefer. "We came up with some slightly-less favorable outcomes than the environmental assessment consultants."
Preserving heritage and the economic impact of the built environment
Laefer did her PhD work in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Edward J. Cording, PhD, who had directed underground construction projects from the subway chambers and tunnels of the Metro in Washington, DC, during the early 1970s to water supply tunnels in the soft rock of Utah and Nevada.
Laefer's independent research program has flourished at Dublin. "My research topics are much more core to European thinking, so it's somewhat 'easier' to get funding and access to things and people." She notes, for example, that much of the international tunneling expertise is in Europe, with Germany being the major producer of tunneling equipment.
The European funding environment is equal to or more competitive than in the States–the latest ERC Advanced Project funding rate was 8.3 percent. But Laefer says that European thinking on her science also extends to economics and reflects a sentiment of "preserving heritage and that your built environment is actually a revenue generator," particularly in terms of tourism.
But it took time to turn grant reviewers her way when it came to computing tunneling stress on old buildings. Some commented that her models were "ugly." Laefer says that the computer advances in gaming and virtual reality have misled some to think that it's easy to now represent visual attributes of cities and the underground.
Voxelization (turning into cubes): an aerial laser scan of central Dublin along Dawson Street. All... [+]
"But visual details have very little impact on our world," says Laefer. Her models have to integrate the exact geometry of buildings as well as the geometry of windows that controls a building's stiffness and the response to ground movements.
She says that a lot of the initial work done by her group was misunderstood by reviewers. "When I first applied to the ERC, I got four reviews back. Two were clearly from computer science and two were from civil engineering," says Laefer. "The computer scientists said, 'this work has already been done.' And the civil engineers wrote back and said, 'wow, this work is so difficult, it could never be done.' At that point, I realized I had a communication problem."
Laefer's team ultimately scored the ERC funding as the agency modified the structure of review panels. But as she began to convince reviewers that she had the technology and expertise, she also convinced stakeholders of the economic case for her work. The mitigation of damage to historic buildings can often be five to ten percent of a project, meaning that reducing costs in a several billion dollar initiative will more than pay for the cost of her ERC project.
Laefer says that the ERC funding, starting in January, 2013 has made all the difference in the quality of people she could recruit and the level of training that she can provide for them. "Not just for sending them to conferences but also sending them to another institution for a few months it's a funding level that's not available in a lot of grants. So the students and postdocs are taking great advantage of these opportunities and we've won two international awards this year, one at a masonry meeting and one for a paper in Geomatics.
Finally, I asked Laefer if she had any closing comments for Forbes readers–those who might be interested more in the business applications of basic research. Laefer said that work that is perhaps a few steps ahead of purely basic studies can clearly benefit industry, as in the case of her research team. She felt that the current push by university administrations for faculty to pursue entrepreneurial projects and spin out companies was not necessarily the best use of their limited time, given the ever increasing workload on faculty and unfunded mandates.
