Prof Peter Pivonka: He Designed Bridge Foundations, Now He Says Concrete Is Boring
from Inside The Shoulder Hosted by Dr. Kenneth Cutbush
Peter Pivonka's PhD was on concrete failure. Earthquake engineering, and how the foundations of large bridges give way. Then a supervisor asked him what he thought about doing biomechanics in bone. His first reaction was that it sounded strange. His second was more interesting. Concrete is already well understood, and there is only so much more to be gained. Bone was wide open. Thirty years on he is Professor and Chair of Biomechanics at Queensland University of Technology and co director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre in Joint Biomechanics. He looks at what his old colleagues are still doing in concrete and finds it boring. He covers the path from Vienna to Newcastle on a Schrödinger Fellowship, a planned six months of surfing that never happened, and the reality of supervising twenty five PhD candidates with wildly different skill sets. The most valuable section is on failure. He describes a major grant application that took two months of full time work and fell just below the funding line, in the top five per cent of unfunded applications. He reapplied. The panel had changed, there was no institutional memory of the first round, and he lost again. There was no third attempt. He is also thoughtful on PhD students who do not finish, and pushes back on a society obsessed with winners.
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