Dr. Dallas N. Little

Professor Little currently is holder of the E. B. Snead endowed chair in Transportation Engineering in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering of the Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University. He teaches graduate courses in the areas of asphalt technology, chemical soil and aggregate stabilization, aggregate technology, micromechanics, and structural pavement design. He also teaches an undergraduate course for the Look College of Engineering in Materials Engineering designed for civil, chemical, mechanical, petroleum, industrial, and aerospace engineers.

Professor Little is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI). In this position, he is responsible for the development of new research initiatives with government and private entities. He is currently the principal investigator for Texas A&M University’s contribution to the Asphalt Research Consortium (ARC). The ARC is funded through the Federal Highway Administration to provide fundamental research in asphalt technology that will directly improve the ability to predict and impact the performance of the nation’s asphalt pavement infrastructure. The ARC is a consortium of three universities, a national research institute and a nationally renowned private laboratory.

Professor Little is also associate director of the International Center for Aggregates Research (ICAR), which is a joint center between Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin. ICAR is funded by an endowment from the aggregates industry. As associate director of ICAR, Little is responsible for the development of research initiatives that address the needs of the aggregates industry.

During his 33 years at Texas A&M University, and while pursing his research interests in material science and engineering, asphalt technology, pavement design, soil stabilization, fracture mechanics, soil mechanics and foundation engineering, Professor Little has authored approximately 325 significant reports (including about 130 journal articles) and has given approximately 300 invited lectures on technical subjects including lectures in 42 states and 14 countries. He served two terms as chair of the Transportation Research Boards (TRB'S) Committee A2D04, "Characterization of Bituminous Mixtures to Meet Structural Requirements. He served as secretary of TRB committee A2J03, "Soil-Cement Stabilization" and Committee A2J01, "Chemical Stabilization of Soils." He served as chair of the Expert Task Group monitoring Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP) contract A-003a, “development of Asphalt Mixture Tests to Validate SHRP Asphalt Binder Tests and Specifications”. He served as a member of the Federal Highway Administration’s Expert Task Group on “Accelerated Testing of Asphalt Concrete Pavements” and is a member of the NCHRP panels 9-19 and 4-23 on the “Development of Pavement Performance Models”. He is recently completed an assignment as a member of the TRB Superpave Committee.  From 1992 through the present, Little has served as a member of the Expert Task Group for the FHWA project entitled “Fundamental Properties of Asphalts and Modified Asphalts”.  He also served as a member of the Blue Ribbon Review Committee for Bayex Corporation on use of geogrids to retard reflection cracking in asphalt overlays.

Professor Little is currently co-chair of the Federal Highway Administration’s Expert Task Group on Fundamental Properties and Modeling of Asphalt Materials.  He is a member of the Transportation Research Board (National Research Council) team to update the State of the Art Report on soil and aggregate stabilization with hydrated lime and edited the Transportation Research Board’s millennium report on soil stabilization with lime, Portland cement and fly ash. He is a member of the advisory board of the Texas Department of Transportation’s Accelerated Testing Program, and presently serves on as a member of the Scientific Committee representing North America for the Treatment and Recycling of Engineering Materials for the Transportation Infrastructure (TREMTI). He is also currently serving on the Scientific Committee for the International Conference on Advanced Characterization of Pavement and Soil Engineering Materials. 

He is a member of a number of other professional societies and is a fellow in the American Society of Civil Engineers. He has been awarded the J.W. Emmons award by the Association of Asphalt Paving Technologists (AAPT) three times as a contributing author of the outstanding paper in asphalt technology (for 1981, 1998, and 2006). He received the Trinity Industries/C. V. Wootan Career Achievement Award in 1999 for Research Leadership in Materials Engineering. Recently several other technical papers co-authored by Professor Little have received recognition. These include two papers that were nominated for the K. B. Woods award by the Design and Construction Committee of the Transportation Research Board. These were, “Effect of Moisture on Material Properties and Fracture Resistance of Asphalt Mixtures”, 2005, and “Ettringite Formation in Lime-Treated Soils: Establishing Thermodynamic Foundations for Engineering Practice”, 2006. He co-author of a paper entitled, “Sensitivity of HMA Performance to Aggregate Shape Measured Using Conventional Image Analysis Methods”, which received the “Best Scientific Paper Award” from the International Journal of Road Materials and Pavement Design in 2005. Professor Little recently completed a term as associate editor of the American Society of Civil Engineer’s Journal of Materials Engineering, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Applied Asphalt Binder Technology, University of Calgary.