Sougata Roy, a Ph.D. candidate in civil engineering, has been invited to speak at the American Welding Society's fifth annual Weld Cracking Conference in February in New Orleans.

AWS, which is headquartered in Miami, Fla., advances the science, technology, and application of welding and allied processes including joining, brazing, soldering, cutting, and thermal spray.

Roy, who worked as an engineering consultant for 11 years in Asia before enrolling at Lehigh, recently won the award for best research paper by a graduate student from the Engineers' Society of Western Pennsylvania.

The title of his paper was "Improving Fatigue Strength of Cover Plate and Stiffener Details using Ultrasonic Impact Treatment."

Roy, who received his M.S. in civil engineering from Lehigh in 2001, is advised by John W. Fisher, professor emeritus of civil engineering. He does experimental and theoretical studies of the effects of high-cycle fatigue on welded steel bridges and is particularly interested in Ultrasonic Impact Treatment, a technique developed in Russia during the Cold War to improve the fatigue strength of welded submarines.