Collette Burke joins Australian Road Research Board (ARRB)

The Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) has announced the high-profile appointment of Victoria’s first Chief Engineer, Dr Collette Burke, to work with the organisation.

Dr Burke will use her vast experience and influence to re-engineer our future vision and strategy to ensure alignment with our stakeholders and the unprecedented demand for innovation in assets.

Based in our Melbourne head office, Dr Burke will be part of our Road Asset Performance team, which specialises in asset management, data collection and analysis, and infrastructure measurement.

ARRB is focussed on the development of new knowledge in this area to provide guidance for the public and private sector on next generation asset management and better value for money economic outcomes.

Dr Burke spent two and a half years as Victoria’s Chief Engineer and brings extensive and diverse experience to ARRB – the National Transport Research Organisation.

But she says her passion for asset management, and the type of work she had been doing in her role as Victoria’s Chief Engineer, made ARRB a perfect fit for the next career challenge.

“My early career was a lot in building roads, bridges and tunnels, and I have particular experience in looking where roads failed,” Dr Burke said.

“In recent years as Chief Engineer, I looked at raising the profile of asset management in government, and what was needed for whole-of-life asset management. I’m particularly interested in technology – digital engineering, sensors in bridges, pavement predictive technology such as ARRB’s iPAVE and iSSAVe.

“I have a deep interest in trying to see if we could make a bigger impact on industry for better decision-making on our assets, and looking how we maintain them.”

Chief Executive of ARRB Michael Caltabiano said: ”The appointment of Dr Collette Burke to this role will indeed allow our organisation to work closely with transport agencies across Australia and New Zealand and the private sector to shape our transport future”.

“Our journey as an organisation is to reimagine the transport journey and embed the opportunities that integrated mobility options bring to our community.

“Collette has many years of exceptional experience, that when combined with some of the brightest minds in the transport sector at ARRB, will enable us to deliver more great outcomes for our road and transport communities across Australia.”

Dr Burke’s role will be a strategic one - helping highlight ARRB’s work and the benefits of infrastructure measurement and data analysis, to government and the private sector.

“As Victoria’s Chief Engineer, I was able to work on some amazing projects and a lot of that work is very well aligned work to what ARRB’s been doing, so I’m hoping ARRB is going to drive new knowledge in these areas to deliver some great outcomes,” Dr Burke said.

“ARRB’s a fantastic environment, incredible labs, a really friendly working place. I think ARRB have been the quiet achievers in the infrastructure sector. They’ve been doing fantastic work.

“Already I’ve had some great conversations with people in the office, but I also have a great network outside. So the aim is to strengthen and create those networks between ARRB, industry and government.

“That’s one of my strengths, and there’s really good opportunities to do that.”

Find out more about ARRB's Asset Management capabilities here