Building on a Legacy: Somayeh Nassiri Named Director of UC Pavement Research Center

The University of California Pavement Research Center, or UCPRC, turns research data into tools and practices agencies use to improve California’s roads. Somayeh Nassiri, the center’s new director and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis, is driven to build on this legacy by advancing the state’s leadership in pavement innovation and collaborating with transportation agencies across the nation and globe. 

For decades, UCPRC’s flagship partnership has been with Caltrans, the transportation agency overseeing the Golden State’s 50,000 miles of highway and freeway lanes.  

“I hope to continue our strong partnership with Caltrans, to nurture, protect and build on that legacy,” Nassiri said. “I also would like to work on making sure that some of the practices, technologies, test methods and materials that we verify and put out there help other regions of the country and the world.” 

Expanding UCPRC's national and global collaborations is a way to bring more expertise, partnerships and resources back to California while sharing the state's innovations with other transportation agencies, Nassiri said. 

 

Building the Legacy

When the center launched in 1948 as part of UC Berkeley, it operated under a different name and focused solely on asphalt research. 

UC Davis Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering John Harvey renamed it to UCPRC when he took over as director in the late 1990s. The new name reflected Harvey’s vision for the center. Under his leadership, he encouraged research into all types of pavements and his staff to become general pavement engineers in addition to being specialists.  

“If it’s hard, flat and on the ground, we’re interested,” Harvey said. 

When he moved the center headquarters to UC Davis in 2002, Harvey began building a culture with service as its heart. A researcher who dedicated his dissertation to the people of California who helped fund his education, he viewed the center’s primary role as helping transportation agencies make the decisions that benefit the state the most.  

This meant rethinking research papers, which often never reach the desks of decision makers. For him, research has the greatest value in the form of reports and tools that help transportation agencies implement changes to improve roads. 

“We're not the deciders,” he said. “We're the influencers. We’re giving them better data and analysis to make better decisions.”  

Harvey’s vision for the center, which has elevated it into being one of the leading pavement research groups in the world, forms the backbone of Nassiri’s aims for UCPRC. 

“I understand the pressure, I understand the expectation and I understand John's legacy,” she said. “The goal has to be to continue delivering high-quality research that can benefit the state, benefit the people.” 

Trust Takes Time

The connection between Harvey and Nassiri goes beyond the conventional story of succession.  

Harvey recognized that the success of UCPRC depends on relationships built on trust over decades, which are built on communication and the delivery of useful results. It would take time for a new director to understand those relationships and the needs and expectations of both research sponsors and the center as a whole.  

He knew he needed to find a replacement years before his retirement and recommended that his successor be recruited early. In 2022, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering hired Nassiri with the intention that she would succeed him as director. This allowed Nassiri to learn the ins and outs of the UCPRC while working alongside Harvey. 

Most importantly, it gave her the time to build trust and meaningful relationships with the engineers, professional researchers and other technical and administrative staff in UCPRC and with the center’s partners, such as Caltrans. 

“I think I can be the glue for UCPRC to [stay] aligned and genuinely make people's lives better when it comes to taxpayer money that goes toward our roads,” Nassiri said. 

She believes the center's greatest strength lies in connecting researchers, practitioners and decision-makers, so promising innovations move more efficiently from the laboratory into practice. 

“The leadership team led by Nassiri has the passion, and they really are implementers,” Harvey said. “They have the mindset, they’re good communicators and they know how to deliver implementable pavement engineering results.” 

A Path Forward

As the center’s director, Nassiri is committed to delivering solutions that help California by strengthening existing partnerships, investing in practical research and expanding collaborative research projects.  

One program Nassiri pointed to as a signature of their relationship with Caltrans is testing the performance of different pavement materials and structures. They use heavy vehicle simulators, or HVS, a large vehicle meant to approximate years of wear and tear in a matter of months, to see how the designs fail.  

Research like this informs the UCPRC’s support of Caltrans’ strategic goals of improving cost-effectiveness, increasing sustainability and conserving finite resources. The work of the center also includes strategic planning, captured in roadmaps for pavement materials, design and management. Nassiri wants to continue investing in these research efforts and supporting the decision-making process for Caltrans and other state agencies. 

She also wants to grow collaborative efforts like the Lab2Slab program. Funded by Caltrans and made possible through industry partnerships, the program evaluates and accelerates the adoption of sustainable concrete materials and technologies, reducing implementation timelines from 10 years to two years.  

Nassiri wants to drive the center to do more collaborative efforts like this, especially ones that bring together industry, transportation agencies and researchers from universities across the country. 

"What I can do is encourage, strengthen and level the path for collaborations, leading multi-scale, multi-collaborative projects and proposals to solve California’s most pressing pavement challenges," she said. 

A New Legacy

For Harvey, with Nassiri as director and the full leadership and staff team supporting her, the center’s future is brighter than ever. 

“The airplane’s going to keep flying as we change the pilots and the crew and pieces of the airplane,” he said. “That's probably my greatest satisfaction: not just what we've accomplished, but what we're going to accomplish. The mission of the UCPRC is to keep delivering, keep making things better.”  

For Nassiri, the same curiosity that brought her to pavement research in the first place continues to shape her approach as a researcher and leader. 

“I've spent nights trying to find out why lab results behave the way they do,” she said. “Trying to explain why a new behavior is happening is just truly intriguing to me. I hope to encourage team members to ask deeper questions and translate laboratory discoveries into better pavements.”