Profile

I am currently an assistant professor in the section of Applied Mechanics at the faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences of TU Delft.
I received my B.Sc. (2007) and M.Sc. (2010) degree in civil engineering at University of Parma (Italy), where in 2010 I also worked as researcher at the department of engineering and architecture with focus on modelling of reinforced concrete elements subject to cyclic loading. In 2016, I obtained my Ph.D. degree in structural mechanics from TU Delft with my study on multiscale modelling of fracture processes in concrete. My Ph.D. project was part of the NWO program Integral Solution for Sustainable Construction (IS2C). From 2015 to 2018, I continued my research work in the same group as postdoc with focus on seismic vulnerability assessment of unreinforced masonry buildings. The work provided input to the newly developed Dutch building code for structural assessment due to induced seismicity (NPR9998:2018) and supported the development and validation of numerical modelling approaches daily employed for structural assessment.

Research interests

• Fracture processes in quasi-brittle materials
• Continuum micromechanically based multiscale models
• Structural assessment and rehabilitation
• In-situ material characterisation
• Experimental and computational mechanics
• Unreinforced masonry structures

Research

Through my research I hope to contribute to the preservation and reuse of existing structures by understanding and modelling fracture processes in quasi-brittle materials and structures. Fascinated by the effect that a tiny defect can have on the entire response of a structure, I carried out research in different fields including mechanics of materials, computational mechanics, and structural assessment with the scope of being able to describe the link between phenomena occurring at the level of material’s constituents (sub-mm/mm scale) and performance of structures (m scale).