Keynote Speakers

Professor Guo-Qiang Li
Tongji University, China 

Guo-Qiang Li is Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering in Tongji University, the Director of the Research Centre for Steel Construction of the Education Ministry of China and the Director of the National Research Centre for Pre-fabrication Construction of China.  He is also a Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Society of Steel Construction, a Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Association of Construction Standardization, a Foreign Member of the Royal Flemish Academy for Science and the Arts of Belgium, a Fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers in UK and a Fellow of the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Professor Li’s research has been mainly in the area of hazard mitigation for steel construction, including earthquake-resistance, fire-resistance and blast-resistance of steel structures.  A recipient of many awards and honours, he has published 16 technical books and more than 800 journal papers in English and Chinese relevant to his research topics.

Professor M Ahmer Wadee
Imperial College London, UK

Ahmer Wadee is Professor of Nonlinear Mechanics within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London. He leads research specialising in the field of nonlinear structural stability, where his primary research interests include analytical modelling of localised instabilities in structures, conventional materials and metamaterials, alongside modal interactions in globally and locally slender metallic and composite structures. In 2014, he was listed as one of the 100 Leading Practising Scientists in the UK by The Science Council. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, a Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, a Chartered Scientist and a Chartered Mathematician. Since 2019, he has served as Editor of Thin-Walled Structures, and has also served on the Editorial Board of Structures, the research journal of the Institution of Structural Engineers, since 2015. He has published over 200 articles in the scientific literature and won several awards for his research and education work. A strong advocator of outreach work, he co-edited “50 Visions of Mathematics” published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

Professor Sergio Pellegrino
California Institute of Technology, USA 

Sergio Pellegrino is the Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, Senior Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Co-Director of the Space Solar Power Project. After earning a PhD in Structural Mechanics from the University of Cambridge in 1986, he spent more than 20 years there while based in the Department of Engineering, during which he founded the Deployable Structures Laboratory. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of Colorado (Boulder), Stanford and Harvard, among others. Pellegrino’s general area of research is the mechanics of lightweight structures, focusing on packaging, deployment, shape control and stability. With his students and collaborators, he is currently working on novel concepts for future space telescopes, spacecraft antennas, and space-based solar power systems. As a member of the design team of the NASA Super Pressure Balloon from 2003 to 2016, he has worked extensively on analysis methods for stratospheric balloons. He has authored over 350 publications and registered 17 patents. A recipient of numerous awards, Prof. Pellegrino is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a Chartered Structural Engineer. He is a Past President of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), and founding chair of the AIAA Spacecraft Structures Technical Committee.

Professor Nuno Silvestre
University of Lisbon, Portugal

Nuno Silvestre is Full Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal. His research interests fall into two main areas: (i) numerical methods and analytical tools for the analysis and design of thin-walled structures; (ii) nanomechanics and simulation of thin nanostructures. In the first area, his work on the development of Generalized Beam Theory (GBT) has received world recognition. In the second, he has made very significant contributions on the computational modelling and mechanical behaviour of carbon nanotubes (CNT) and CNT-reinforced matrix composites. His publications include over 250 articles in international indexed journals, some edited books and around 300 papers in proceedings of international conferences. Besides being Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal, Thin-Walled Structures, and a member of several editorial boards of international journals, he has also been the President of the Portuguese Institute of Mechanical Engineering (IDMEC) and Vice-President of the Associated Laboratory of Energy, Transportation and Aerospace (LAETA) in Portugal. Professor Silvestre has received many awards from national and international agencies for his scientific achievements.

Professor Olivia Mirza
Western Sydney University, Australia

Olivia Mirza is Professor of Structural Engineering, and Associate Dean for Engagement in the School of Engineering, Design and Built Environment of Western Sydney University (WSU) in Australia. After working in industry for 12 years as a structural engineer, and earning a PhD from WSU, she took up an academic position with WSU. Her research has focussed on the behaviour of shear connectors in composite steel-concrete beams, the effectiveness of steel fibres in strengthening composite steel-concrete beams, sustainable concrete construction, and related topics. Besides authoring many papers on these topics, she has distinguished herself in forensic bridge rehabilitation, and has been the lead engineer on a number of projects in Sydney. One of these was the retrofitting of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, where she proposed a resilient alternative that combined precast modular construction with steel-concrete composite technology. Her passion for contributing to the fulfilment of Australia’s 2050 net zero pledge is reflected in her involvement in a recent light-rail project using concrete reinforced with macro-synthetic fibres, Australia’s first “green track”. She has been a recipient of many awards, and is currently the Sydney Division President for Engineers Australia.

Professor Jörg Schröder
University Duisburg-Essen, Germany 

Jörg Schröder is Professor of Mechanics at the University Duisburg-Essen, and previously served as Vice-Rector for Research there. He was the President of the German Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM) from 2020 to 2023, and is now serving as Vice-President until 2025. He is a Member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering, and of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. His areas of research interest are computational mechanics, continuum mechanics, and constitutive modeling. While direct methods in multiscale modeling have been his focus in the last three decades, his latest work has dealt with the coupling of electro-magneto-mechanical effects and simplified microstructural models based on statistically similar representative volume elements. Another focus has been the phenomenological descriptions of fiber-reinforced modern concretes and their regularization using the phase field method. He is the co-author of over 300 technical papers and 15 book. Professor Schröder serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Archive of Applied Mechanics”, published by Springer.

Professor Geert Degrande
KU Leuven, Belgium

Geert Degrande is Professor of Structural Mechanics in the Department of Civil Engineering of KU Leuven in Belgium. He served as Head of the Department of Civil Engineering from 2008 until 2016, and is presently Head of the Structural Mechanics Section. His main research interests are structural dynamics, dynamic soil-structure interaction, elasto-dynamics, computational mechanics, and inverse problems. More recently, the emphasis of his research has shifted towards vibration problems in the built environment caused by road and railway traffic, and by industry and construction activities. This has involved the use of both numerical and experimental methods. He has published over 110 refereed journal papers and over 280 conference papers in these areas. In 2022, he was Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse College (Cambridge), and Academic Visitor at the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge. He is a Subject Editor for the Journal of Sound and Vibration (since 2010), and serves on the editorial boards of Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering (since 2009), the International Journal of Railway Technology (since 2012), Railway Engineering Science (since 2019), Transportation Engineering (since 2020), Transportation Geotechnics (since 2021), and the International Journal of Railway Research (since 2022). He was Co-Chair of the 8th International Conference on Structural Dynamics (EURODYN 2011), held in Leuven (Belgium), and Chair of the 13th International Workshop on Railway Noise (IWRN13), held in 2019 in Ghent (Belgium).

Professor Chul-Woo Kim
Kyoto University, Japan

Chul-Woo Kim is Chair Professor in the Infrastructure Innovation Engineering Laboratory (Civil and Earth Resources Engineering) at Kyoto University. Prior to his appointment at Kyoto University, he was Chief Engineer of a consulting company, during which time he was involved in the cable vibration monitoring of the Stone Cutter Bridge in Hong Kong. His research interests include, among others, vehicle-bridge interactive systems, SHM of bridges, sensing for civil infrastructure, condition assessment and data-driven infrastructure management. He is one of the pioneers of the concept of “drive-by bridge inspection”, a vehicle-based monitoring of bridges. He advises municipalities in Japan and abroad on managing bridges and other infrastructure. He serves as the Chairman of the Strategic Technical Committee on Bridge Health Monitoring in the Kansai Chapter of the Japanese Society for Civil Engineers (JSCE). He also serves as a working group member of IFIP TC7 WG 7.5 on Reliability and Optimization of Structural Systems, and has served as a board member of the International Society for Weigh-in-Motion. Prof. Kim has published more than 380 papers (including 138 peer-reviewed journal papers), and is a recipient of many awards.

Professor Genevieve Langdon
University of Sheffield, UK

Genevieve Langdon is Professor of Blast and Impact Engineering in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering of the University of Sheffield. A mechanical engineering graduate of the University of Liverpool, her PhD work focused on the response of corrugated blast walls with semi-rigid connections to gas explosion loading. Genevieve joined Sheffield University in 2020 after fifteen years with the University of Cape Town, where she gained first-hand experience in explosion testing, and served as Director of the Blast Impact and Survivability Research Unit for five years. Her research is concerned with the response and failure of structures and materials subjected to explosion loading and other extreme loading conditions. The focus has been on the survivability of lightweight structures and materials to blast loading, blast injury, and the transient response of structures subjected to explosion loading. She has published many articles in leading international journals, and has been invited to present her work at various international conferences on these topics. She serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Impact Engineering, and Thin-Walled Structures, both published by Elsevier. She is registered as a Chartered Engineer with the UK Engineering Council, and is a member of both the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and the British Society for Strain Measurement.