The proposal has symbiotic parallel objectives in career development and technical innovation. On the career development side the objective is to support the fellow in attaining a leading independent position after the fellowship. The technological objective is to develop the next generation of bridge monitoring technology.The fellow has 10 years postgraduate experience in both research and industry. He has completed his PhD in Ireland. The topic of his PhD was the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of bridges. A number of novel findings were uncovered in the course of the research, as evidenced by the 4 journal & 3 conference papers resulting from the work.The host organisation is the Vibration Engineering Section (VES) at the University of Sheffield. The Scientist in charge is Professor James Brownjohn who has 25 years experience in structural monitoring, an outstanding publication record and has been principal investigator for more than €2m worth of funding since 2005.The technological aim of the proposal is to develop a technically advanced system to support bridge decisions e.g. need for maintenance, traffic restrictions or closure. This will be achieved by combining the SHM experience of the fellow with the multidisciplinary expertise of the VES, in particular their competency in sensors, field testing and data fusion.In terms of career development the fellow has many of the skills necessary to achieve a position of professional maturity as evidenced by being interviewed for lecturing positions in 4 universities this summer. However for the researcher to make a significant impact internationally, he needs to develop competencies in a number of key areas such as structural instrumentation, data fusion & proposal writing. In VES he will have to learn leading edge technologies very fast in real world conditions. This will be supplemented by specialist training courses to address any remaining skills that have been identified as needing development