Personal website

On this website, you can find information about my research and teaching activities as Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Civil and Environmental Engineering today

Civil and Environmental Engineering is about fulfilling essential needs of humanity and understanding the world as we experience it. It plays a vital role in preserving our Earth; providing safe and comfortable homes; making transportation and communication possible; producing and delivering energy; exploring the ground, the underground, and space. For others, Civil and Environmental Engineering is even more: it is about elevation, making earthly connections with higher concepts of beauty or grandeur deeply rooted in each and every human being (think of the sight of the Pantheon walking the narrow streets of Rome).

Such a broad range of past accomplishments serving humanity is a motivation for the present and the future of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Today, developing and implementing cutting-edge science, engineering, technology, and methodologies is needed to address the unprecedented challenges humanity is facing. These challenges are numerous and vertiginous. How do we adapt the way we design, build, maintain, and operate infrastructures and buildings to reduce drastically their negative impacts on the environment and how do we adapt our infrastructures and buildings to climate change? All while fulfilling essential human needs? We need to develop research and to design teaching curricula where such questions are clearly formulated and addressed so that the next generation of engineers and researchers is trained to serve humanity in a sustainable way.