Bill Caswell
Bill Caswell, is a native of Narragansett, Rhode Island, and attended the University of Rhode Island, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1984. He has been employed as a civil engineer at the New Hampshire Department of Transportation since college.

Being new to New Hampshire, his first supervisor at NHDOT suggested visiting the state’s covered bridges. The craftsmanship of those structures combined with his life-long interest in history set his future on a new path. Bill and his wife Jennifer have visited most of the standing covered bridges in the United States and Canada. In 2002, he co-founded a research project to document the past and present covered bridges of the United States and Canada. The "Covered Spans of Yesteryear" website, www.lostbridges.org, presently documents over 14,000 covered and uncovered wood truss bridges. He is the author of Connecticut and Rhode Island Covered Bridges (2011) and the most recent edition of the World Guide to Covered Bridges (2021). He is actively involved in a number of covered bridge organizations. He has served as the newsletter editor, historian, vice president and, since 2014, president of the all-volunteer, non-profit National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges.

Daniel Kurdziel, PE

Daniel graduated from Purdue University and started his career working on U.S. Highway bridges, interstate bridges, and county crossings throughout Indiana. Daniel has also designed bridges overseas in Azerbaijan and assisted in getting local structural staff into the office in the country’s capital Baku. After obtaining his professional engineering license, Daniel went back to school in the evenings to obtain an MBA from Butler University. This led to him leading bridge departments for the subsequent 10 years.Daniel has since been working with Jim and increasing his focus and passion for historic bridges.

Christopher H. Marston
Christopher H. Marston has been an architect with the Historic American Engineering Record since 1989 and has led HAER teams recording a variety of sites. He was the project manager of the HAER National Covered Bridges Recording Project from 2002-2019. He served as a co-editor for three books: Guidelines for Rehabilitation of Historic Covered Bridges (with Tom Vitanza, HAER, 2019), Covered Bridges and the Birth of American Engineering (HAER, 2015), and America’s National Park Roads and Parkways: Drawings from the Historic American Engineering Record (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). He has degrees in architecture from the University of Virginia and Carnegie-Mellon University and is a Past President of the Society for Industrial Archeology. 

Thomas Vitanza, RA, AIA
Tom Vitanza is a Registered Architect MD, NCARB. He was a Senior Historical Architect for 22 years (Emeritus since 10/22) at the National Park Service Historic Preservation Training Center. He is the author of the National Park Service (NPS) Guidelines for Rehabilitating Historic Covered Bridges (2019) and Co-Editor with Christopher Marston & Editor of Case Studies Section. Tom is the design architect for numerous NPS historic timber frame and log structures incl: dwellings, barns, engineered structures, bridges, and NPS specific building types. He was the President of the APTDC Chapter (1999), APTDC Officer, Board, and Committee Duties: 1996 – 2020, and Architect mentor for the National Council of Preservation Education program 30 years (several resultant RA’s).

Rachel Will, PE, Co-Chair, APT Preservation Engineering Tehcnical Committee
Rachel is a Principal and Executive Director of Knowledge Sharing at Wiss Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. She performs building envelope evaluations and investigations of distressed and deteriorated conditions in existing buildings. She has performed numerous facade inspections, condition surveys, repair design, construction document preparation, and construction observation. Ms. Will’s expertise includes documentation and investigation of building facades with a focus on brick, terra cotta and stone masonry as well as preservation and repair of historic buildings. She has authored/coauthored and presented numerous papers regarding historic masonry. While attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ms. Will completed her master’s thesis, which analyzed the effect of ten unique structural building codes on historic preservation projects.