Roadside Safety

Texas A&M Transportation Institute
1254 Avenue A
Room 100
Bryan, TX 77807
(979) 317-2703
[email protected]

Dr. Bligh is a Senior Research Engineer, Manager of the Roadside Safety Program, and Director of the Center for Transportation Computational Mechanics at TTI. He holds both a Master of Science and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Texas A&M University and is a registered Professional Engineer.  Dr. Bligh has 39 years of experience as a roadside safety researcher in applied research related to the design, analysis, testing, and evaluation of roadside safety devices and the development of guidelines for the use, selection, and placement of these structures. Dr. Bligh has co-authored more than 280 publications in this area and is a three-time recipient of the prestigious K.B. Woods Award, which is given annually by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) for the outstanding paper published in the field of design and construction of transportation facilities. He is a Texas A&M University System Regents Fellow and the recipient of the Kenneth Stonex award given by the TRB Standing Committee on Roadside Safety Design for career achievement in roadside safety. 

Dr. Bligh has made contributions to the design of numerous roadside safety devices including guardrails, bridge rails, guardrail/bridge rail transitions, guardrail end treatments, median barriers, breakaway sign supports and luminaire poles, portable concrete barriers, and work zone traffic control devices. Dr. Bligh is intimately familiar with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) and has supervised many crash tests following its procedures. Dr. Bligh worked on an update to MASH for the AASHTO Technical Committee on Roadside Safety (TCRS) that included test matrices for evaluating wire rope barrier systems in median ditches and other changes to test matrices, design vehicles, and evaluation criteria. The revised document published in December 2016 as MASH Second Edition, 2016. He is also a member of the AASHTO MASH Task Force that develops clarifications and interpretations pertaining to the MASH document that are published on the AASHTO website in the form of Q&As.  Dr. Bligh is currently Principal Investigator of an AASHTO sponsored study under which MASH is being converted to a set of performance specifications. He is also past chair of TRB Committee AKD20, Roadside Safety Design.

Dr. Bligh is currently serving as Director of the Center for Transportation Computational Mechanics (CeTCoM), which is a competitively procured center established by FHWA that focuses on the application of nonlinear dynamic finite element analysis to roadside Safety design. He also serves as chair of TRB Subcommittee AFB20(1), Computational Mechanics, for 12 years.