Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Structural Engineering, University of California, San Diego, 2022
  • M.S., Structural Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, 2017
  • B.S., Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Durgapur, 2014
Academic Appointments
  • Associate-in (course instructor), University of California San Diego, 2021-2022.
  • Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering, Assam Engineering College, Guwahati, India. 2018.
Professional Honors
  • University of California San Diego, Structural Engineering Dissertation Fellowship, 2022
  • Best Student Paper Award at the European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring (EWSHM), Palermo, Italy, 2022
  • Charles Lee Powell Foundation Fellowship, 2018
  • Union Grants Commission (UGC) Fellowship by Govt. of India, 2015
Languages
  • Hindi
  • Bengali

Dr. Datta specializes in structural and mechanical engineering. He has particular expertise in developing, testing, and evaluating structural health monitoring and non-destructive evaluation techniques for critical structural components in the civil, railroad and aerospace industries. Dr. Datta has experience with acoustics, ultrasonics, laboratory testing and experiment design, sensors and data acquisition systems, vibrations and structural dynamics, digital signal processing, statistical analysis, structural analysis and design, computer vision techniques and finite element methods.

During his PhD, Dr. Datta developed high-speed non-contact ultrasonic techniques for detecting internal defects in rails and degrading ballast support conditions in railroad ties. His PhD culminated with the development of two working prototypes with real-time data processing capabilities for autonomously detecting structural defects in rails and railroad ties during regular train service runs. Dr. Datta has experience with beamforming techniques for impact and structural defect localization in plates. Other research projects Dr. Datta has worked on include delamination detection in composite plates using infrared thermography and vibration-based stiffness degradation monitoring of structures subjected to earthquakes.

Dr. Datta has a breadth of experience in teaching and industry. At UC San Diego, he worked as a course instructor and taught three undergraduate courses on Solid Mechanics. Prior to beginning his PhD, Dr. Datta worked as an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at Assam Engineering College, India where he taught courses such as Design of Steel Structures and Structural Analysis. As an assistant project engineer at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Dr. Datta developed a user-friendly MATLAB GUI based structural health monitoring toolbox incorporating various techniques for system identification using time and frequency domain analyses. He has also worked at Larsen and Toubro Construction Limited, in India, as a quality control site engineer.