Eric Flynn is a postdoctoral fellow in the Structural Health monitoring research group at the University of California, San Diego in the department of Structural Engineering, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2010 as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He earned his M.S. and B.S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College, respectively, with coursework focus in signal processing and structural dynamics and research focus in structural health monitoring (SHM) and laser imaging interferometry. Eric’s Ph.D. dissertation research was on Bayesian experimental design approaches to structural health monitoring with emphasis in the area of ultrasonic guided waves. He specializes in the design of statistically optimal algorithms and sensing system hardware configurations for detecting the presence of defects in structures according to safety- and/or cost-based specifications. These risk-minimizing designs are derived according to a Bayesian framework that supports, among other things, non-uniform distributions of prior probabilities of damage, arbitrary costs associated with detection error, heterogeneous sensing types, and potential sensor malfunction. Central to Eric’s work in SHM are a number of interdisciplinary collaborations with Los Alamos National Laboratory, including the design and field-testing of wireless sensor nodes and the development of software libraries for statistical processing of sensor data. Eric has authored 13 peer-reviewed journal articles and 16 conference proceedings in SHM and holds a US patent in the field.

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