Obvis People

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Bill Harvey: Bill began to seek a career in bridges at the age of seven. He worked in bridge construction with Freeman Fox & partners, RDL Contracting and British Bridge Builders, chiefly on major bridges, before moving to an academic career as his children entered school. He maintained close links with industry, carrying out laboratory and field testing of bridges and developed Arch Bridge Assessment as a major research interest.

In 1984, he built the first version of Archie, which was then expanded and developed into a commercial product with Fraser Smith. In 1989 he became director of the Wolfson Bridge Research Unit, and in 1991 head of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Dundee. In 1995 he became the first Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Exeter where he remains a visiting professor.

As well as running Obvis, Bill now works as a consultant specialising in solutions for historic structures. He chairs the IStructE informal study group on Management and Maintenance of bridges and was recently elected to the council of the Institution.

Zoltan Juhasz: Zoltan is a lecturer in computer science with strong interests in object-oriented design and programming, visualisation and graphical user interface design. He began collaborating with Bill in 1997 and together they began work on a Archie-M in January 1998. Besides developing new versions of Archie-M Zoltan lectures at the Universities of Veszprem (Hungary) and Exeter (UK).

Philip Denning: Another MA student from English (friends are a wonderful thing), Philip took over from Tristan at the beginning of September 2005. He will now be the first point of contact for many of you. We haven't yet settled what days and hours he will be working.

Tristan Jones: Is an MA student in English at the University if Exeter and had hopes of continuing to do a PhD. He has now left to travel the world.

Joanna Gordon: Worked for Bill some years ago at the University of Exeter and has now joined the OBVIS team as office manager and PA. She will be the first point of contact for many, though, for the moment, she works only Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Please forgive us if things are slower on Wednesday and Friday!

Sue Harvey: Sue has suffered from bridges through 30 years of marriage and can fight it off no longer. She is only occasionally drawn in to OBVIS Ltd, but may answer the phone if Joanna is not available.