Thomas D. White, Ph.D., head of the Civil Engineering Dept. at Mississippi State University, has been elected the new chair of ASTM International Committee D04 on Road and Paving Materials. D04 includes some 580 members who work on 27 technical subcommittees and have jurisdiction over more than 200 standards, published in the Annual Book of ASTM Standards.

White lives in Starkville, Miss.

A registered professional engineer and an ASTM International member since 1973, White serves on a number of D04 groups; in addition he also works on Committee E17 on Vehicle-Pavement Systems. Outside ASTM International, White is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Association of Asphalt Paving Technologists, the Transportation Research Board, and the National Academy of Sciences.

White holds the Construction and Material Industries Chair at Mississippi State, and he is director of the Construction Materials Research Center and the Mississippi Transportation Research Center. In his research he focuses on aggregates, asphalt binders, hot mix asphalt and asphalt and concrete pavements for highways and airfields, and he has conducted finite element analysis of pavement load responses and performance. White has also developed and applied a laboratory wheel tester and prototype scale accelerated pavement tester to understand pavement and material performance.

White gained industry and government experience at Varco Steel, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Chem-Crete Corp. and academic experience as a faculty member of Purdue University's School of Civil Engineering as well as with the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas. White earned his Ph.D. in geotechnical engineering from Purdue University and his M.S. and B.S. from Mississippi State University.

Release #7400