ARA Names Three New Vice Presidents

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. January, 2008 — ARA’s Board of Directors has appointed Dr. Francis M. (Frank) Lavelle, Ms. Nancy A. Renfroe, and Dr. William R. (Bill) Vavrik to Vice President. All three are currently ARA Division Managers.

Frank Lavelle
Frank Lavelle is a Principal Engineer and Manager of ARA’s IntraRisk Division in Raleigh, NC. He has more than 17 years of research, development, and project management experience in the areas of extreme loading effects, risk analysis of structures, and software development.

Frank is currently overseeing ARA’s wind certification inspection work for the My Safe Florida Home program. ARA has completed over 22,000 home inspections under this program during the past 15 months. ARA also developed the database and software used by the State of Florida to produce customized wind mitigation reports for homeowners who participate in the program.

Frank also leads the software development efforts for ARA’s HurLoss model and for the HAZUS Wind Loss Estimation Model. HurLoss is ARA’s proprietary hurricane catastrophe model for estimating insured losses to large portfolios of buildings. HurLoss is also used to estimate probable maximum losses (PMLs) for individual buildings. HAZUS is a joint effort between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) to produce a nationally applicable software program for estimating regional damage and losses from earthquake, flood, and wind hazards.
Frank is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and has been a registered professional engineer in the state of North Carolina since 1994.

Nancy Renfroe
Nancy is a Principal Scientist and Manager of ARA’s Southern Division in Vicksburg, MS, where she specializes in physical security, security risk management, and disaster management. She is a registered Physical Security Professional (PSP) and Building Security Certified Professional (BSCP).

Nancy has more than 20 years of experience in security engineering and training. She has managed numerous programs in security risk and disaster management and in custom software development, including working with security personnel in response to the Department of Justice report on the “Vulnerability of Federal Facilities” and with the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service to develop the Federal Security Risk Management Process that is being used throughout the U.S. Government to assess risk of various level facilities by terrorist and criminal attack.

Before entering the security field, Nancy, who holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in mathematics, performed research and mathematical modeling for the U.S. Army’s Engineering Research and Development Center Waterways Experiment Station. She also worked as a full-time educator and staff development trainer, and now uses her experience in education to train security professionals in risk and disaster management.

Bill Vavrik
Bill Vavrik is a Principal Engineer and Manager of ARA’s Midwest Division in Champaign, IL. He joined ARA in 2000 after earning his doctorate in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Throughout his career, Bill has managed and conducted a wide variety of projects in pavement management, evaluation, design, research, and forensics. He has more than 12 years of experience in a broad range of pavement applications, including local roads and streets, rural roads, highways, airports, ports, and intermodal rail yards.

Additionally, Bill is a well-known speaker at conferences, seminars, and training courses, including regular guest lecturing at the University of Illinois. Prior to his promotion to Division Manager in 2004, he led ARA’s Pavement Consulting Group.

Bill is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the National Society of Professional Engineers, and the Association of Asphalt Paving Technologists. He is a registered professional engineer in Illinois and New York.

About ARA, Inc.

Applied Research Associates, Inc. is an international research and engineering company recognized for providing technically excellent solutions to complex and challenging problems in the physical sciences. The company was founded in Albuquerque, NM, in 1979. ARA has offices throughout the United States and Canada and provides a broad range of technical expertise in defense technologies, civil technologies, computer software and simulation, systems analysis, environmental technologies, and testing and measurement. ARA also provides sophisticated technical products for environmental site characterization, pavement analysis and robotics. For more information, contact ARA by calling 505-881-8074 or email: info@ara.com.