projects
Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.
by Wernher von Braun
by Wernher von Braun
My career in academia started in 2014, right after having completed my M.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering. Ever since then, I have been shaping my career as researcher on a wide variety of topics, all intimately associated with the protection and preservation of architectural heritage assets, particularly of those located in historical centres. In a nutshell: disaster risk mitigation (earthquakes in particular); seismic vulnerability assessment; vernacular architecture; traditional construction techniques and materials; the interaction between buildings enclosed in aggregate; seismic repair cost functions, modular and sustainable architecture, and energy efficiency.
2014-2015 URBSIS project
With my participation as a graduate grantholder in the two-year national project "URBSIS - Assessing Vulnerability and Managing Earthquake Risk at Urban Scale", which was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and jointly supported by the University of Aveiro and the IST Institute of the Technical University of Lisbon, and supervised by professors Romeu Vicente and Carlos S. Oliveira, I gained practical knowledge and interest on: surveying and investigation techniques necessary for the structural characterisation of architectural heritage assets, development and calibration of simplified seismic vulnerability assessment methods, post-earthquake damage assessment, and on the development of earthquake damage and loss estimation scenarios integrated in GIS platforms, for example.
2015-2016 European Commission traineeship
The 5-month traineeship at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra (Italy), in particular at the European Laboratory for Structural Assessment (ELSA) Unit, allowed me to see firsthand what some of the most top researchers in the field of structural and earthquake engineering were doing. The main output from the training on seismic fragility assessment of the European building stock was the technical report published by the European Commission entitled "Seismic fragility curves for the European building stock: review and evaluation of existing fragility curves", and co-authored by Georgios Tsionis, which supervised the training.
2016-2017 Vernacular architecture project
In collaboration with Elao Martin (architecture undergraduate student) Jon Sojkowski (founder of the African Vernacular Architecture platform and database), and Tiago M. Ferreira (University of Minho), I coordinated a research project about vernacular architecture in Namibia aiming at providing clear insights towards the sustainable development of local communities, highlighting the importance of preserving vernacular architecture, and also at identifying the main threats with potential to harm Namibia's vernacular architecture. The findings from our project were compiled and published in the GE Conservación journal in an article entitled "Namibia’s vernacular architecture: insights towards the sustainable development of local communities".
2015-Present Ph.D. research project
My Ph.D. research project aims at addressing some of the most important issues that govern both the in-plane and out-of-plane seismic response of urban cultural heritage (UCH) assets. The primary goal is that of investigating and bridging the methodological gap that exists between simplified methods for the seismic vulnerability assessment at the urban scale and analytical methods, whose computational efforts are not bearable with large-scale assessments, neither cost nor time wise. Therefore, the discussion on how numerical models can support the development and validation of simplified scoring methods for the large-scale assessment of urban cultural heritage assets is going be at stake throughout this project. In other words, the tasks foreseen to be developed in this research project were set in a way that to underscore this strategy of using analytical methods as a means to bring a new light to simplified methods with greater practical applicability.
2017-2019 Buildings enclosed in aggregate project
This project resulted from a collaboration with Sonia Boschi and Chiara Bernardini from the University of Florence, as part of Chiara's Ph.D. research project. The main goal of this project is to investigate, by means of numerical analyses, how a minimum unit of analysis can be defined and if it can be taken as representative of the aggregate effect for evaluating the seismic response of a given structural unit. The findings of this project will be submitted for publication.