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Benoit Verhaeghe, a civil engineer who specialises in transport infrastructure engineering, manages the Infrastructure Engineering competence area of CSIR Built Environment, one of the biggest research areas in the CSIR, with more than 50 permanent staff members under his supervision.
Responsibilities
- Leadership: includes motivating and leading research groups and individual researchers to deliver on CSIR Built Environment's research strategy.
- Management: strategic human capital development to advance individual researchers through their research careers; performance management, ensuring implementation of quality initiatives and retaining ISO accreditation.
- Business: includes constructing and implementing a business plan for operation, sustainable growth and robustness of the competence area and ensuring that the competence area remains a national leader in its field, with international recognition.
- Research and research investment: includes contributing to research strategy development, and implementing appropriate components of research strategy; contributing to strategic investment goal setting and development of a research strategy for the competence area; ensuring high-quality SET expertise and development of appropriate SET capacity and profiles; and establishing and servicing strategic alliances.
Formal education
BSc (Civil), University of Pretoria (South Africa), 1986
MSc (Civil) (Cum Laude), University of Pretoria (South Africa), 1992
Experience
Since joining the CSIR in 1989, Verhaeghe has been involved in a broad range of research activities, including investigating and improving asphalt mix designs for use in urban intersections; investigating the design and laboratory performance of bituminous products manufactured with polymer-modified binders; a study to determine the engineering properties of bitumen-rubber asphalt and the effects of variations in binder consistency, aggregate and grading on those properties; an evaluation of the hot in-place recycling process used for the rehabilitation of distressed asphalt; various studies into the design and performance of polymer-modified asphalt; the development of mix design, structural design and construction guidelines for base courses treated with bitumen-emulsion and foamed bitumen; the development of industry guidelines for the design of hot-mix asphalt and the design and use of porous asphalt; and numerous forensic investigations.
Verhaeghe also led the development of a product performance guarantee system which entails the formal management of product performance guarantees, in which acceptance criteria are based on the functional/structural performance of products rather than on their compliance with end-product specifications.
In 2000, Verhaeghe was appointed by the National Department of Transport to lead a diverse team of experts whose objective was to develop a strategic framework to address the most critical challenges preventing parts of South Africa's road infrastructure from fulfilling its meaningful role as a catalyst for development and as a key provider of accessibility and mobility.
Verhaeghe has published extensively and has served on a significant number of industry and national committees and working groups. He also plays a leading role in the CSIR's efforts to transfer technology through courses (in association with the Asphalt Academy and technical and academic universities), workshops and seminars.
Organisational details
PO Box 395
Pretoria
0001
South Africa
Tel: +27 12 841 2907
Fax: +27 12 842 7108
Email: bverhaeg@csir.co.za
Publications
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