Staff Biographies
Nicolas Gagarin, Ph.D., P.E.
President Starodub, Inc.
Nicolas Gagarin has 18 years of experience in highway engineering. He founded Starodub in September 1993 which incorporated in Maryland in October 1997. His focus is in highway transportation research and development including Bridge, signal processing, pattern recognition, data fusion and mining, and image processing. In 1992, he was the recipient of an Eisenhower Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship from the National Highway Institute. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked as a bridge design engineer for T.Y. Lin International in San Francisco, California. In addition to his work in transportation research, Dr. Gagarin is providing assistance to NASA in the area of signal and image processing under SBIR contracts and a separate consulting contract for problems related to earth sciences, astrophysics, and space exploration. more>
James R. Mekemson, Ph.D., P.E.
Senior Research Engineer
Dr. Mekemson has 33 years of experience as a transportation research engineer. He has worked 13 years in the area of vehicle based data acquisition system design for various pavement and roadway measurement systems and in the development of techniques for analysis of the acquired data. Much of the work was conducted under contract to the Federal Highway Administration within the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center. Development projects have included FHWA’s Digital Highway Measurement van, Ultra-Light Inertial Profiler, PRORUT2 (Research Profiler), and ROSAN (Road Surface analyzer). These systems have been used in a number of research, demonstration, and applied projects and applications. more>
Satish R. Chintakunta, MSEM
Research Engineer
Satish Reddy Chintakunta has 5 years of experience in the areas of nondestructive evaluation of pavements and infrastructure, and pavement performance and modeling. Satish has contributed significantly in developing new ground penetrating radar (GPR) techniques that allow subsurface data and images and to be interpreted accurately by engineers, including a novel continuous/rapid GPR calibration method for pavement applications. He received the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship for the years 2006-2007 from FHWA and successfully completed 3 research projects which resulted in technical reports and a master’s thesis. He developed micromechanical models for thermal properties of flexible and rigid pavements using X-ray tomography techniques and finite element models. more>