Problem Set # 1- question # 1

Hi all,My name is Emmeline Lemos, I am a current Master student in Civil Engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I took my bachelor degree in Civil Engineering at my home country-Brazil. When I decided to leave my country and to come to graduate school,  I came with the great desire to learn more, and to try to absorb as much as possible from teachers, classmates and this new world that I'm surround by. Definitely, this desire to learn is one of my strengths and makes me overcome the challenges.  

As can be seen from my previous and current degree, most of my background is in Civil Engineering which give me not so much knowledge in Mechanics and been one of my weakness. But, Fracture Mechanics is not the first class that I’m taking in this field; I already took FEM and Continuum Mechanics.

I’m working with a comparison between a mechanistic-empirical and mechanistic software to predict the pavement design life. I’m part of Dr. Allen’s research group, and unfortunately we don’t have a website yet. However, if one wants to talk either to me or my group, he can e-mail me (emmelinela@yahoo.com) or can take a look at Dr. Allen’s webpage (http://drdavidhallen.unl.edu/).

Once my research is related to Pavement, I think that fracture mechanics will really contribute because it will help me understand more about the crack behavior in pavement, and in my future education, it will be important to understand the crack in general, if I decided to work with another material instead of asphalt pavement.