The First Indo-US Forensic Engineering Workshop and Beyond

The first Indo-US Forensic Engineering Workshop (INDUSFEW) was successfully completed (December 15 - 17, 2010) at the National Institute of Technology at Tiruchirapalli (NITT), Tamil Nadu, India. Organized jointly by members of the ASCE Technical Council on Forensic Engineering (TCFE), the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), and NITT, the Workshop included 23 technical presentations by both U. S. and Indian forensic experts including several speakers from the Structural Engineering Research Center (SERC), Chennai. The Workshop signified the international collaboration between India and U.S. in the area of Forensic Engineering. The specific outcome of the INDUSFEW workshop is the establishment of a forensic engineering curriculum and the proposal for the Center of Excellence for Failure Analysis (CEFA) at the NITT. This paper reports on the specific outcomes from the Workshop and the progress of the CEFA development.