Biographical Sketch

I am a faculty member of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Northwestern University that I joined in August 2011. Prior to joining Northwestern, I worked at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for 6 years. I obtained my "Laurea" (In the old Italian high educational system the Laurea degree was a five year degree equivalent to BS+MS degree) degree and my PhD in structural engineering from Politecnico Di Milano (Italy). I teach courses of the civil engineering curriculum and perform research in the field of experimental, computational and applied mechanics, with emphasis on heterogeneous and quasi-brittle infrastructure materials. My work on constitutive modeling of concrete through the adoption of the so-called Lattice Discrete Particle Model (LDPM), one of the most accurate and reliable approaches to simulate failure of materials experiencing strain-softening, is known worldwide. In addition, recent work on waterless concrete for Martian constructions has received widespread attention in the technical community and in the media. Under the sponsorship of several agencies my current research focuses on formulating and validating multiscale and multiphysics computational frameworks for the simulation of large scale problems dealing with a variety of different applications including, but not limited to, infrastructure aging and deterioration, structural resiliency, and response of materials and structures to natural and man-made hazards. I am member of ASCE and ACI and active in several technical committees. I serve as the chair of the ACI 209 committee on creep and shrinkage and I served as chair of ACI 446 on fracture mechanics. In these two committees I have been leading an effort to develop practical guidelines for the calibration and validation of concrete models. Furthermore, I serve as treasurer for IA-FraMCoS, president for IA-ConCreep, and I am a member of the EMI Board of Governors. Finally, I was recently awarded the prestigious EMI Fellow membership grade.