Since December 15th of 2019, I’m appointed as a DeSIRE tenure tracker Assistant Professor of Structural Flood Resilience in the Hydraulic Structures and Flood Risk section, at Delft University of Technology. I’m also a member of the 4TU Centre for Resilience Engineering.
I’m a civil engineer with experience in research and consultancy for hydropower and flood defence related projects. I’m interested in the use and implementation of technology (open hardware, innovative sensors and machine learning) in structures design and operation for flood risk management. I currently hold an Msc. in Hydroinformatics and a PhD in probabilistic design of multifunctional flood defences. In the later stage of my career I have also done post-doctoral research on innovative monitoring techniques of flood defences based on fiber optic cables acoustic sensing and in sewer systems Bayesian inference methods based on CCTV visual inspections information.
Since the early start of my career I have been very much interested in the use of real time monitoring of flood management structures and the post-processing of these measurements via surrogate modeling for structural operation. The combination of real time monitoring and data driven modeling, allows to have a fast and accurate diagnosis of a flood defence system for operation. This is of paramount importance for flood risk managers and stakeholders as it makes flood defence systems more flexible and resilient plus it can also be used for risk reduction, early warning, evacuation decision and even asset management. As a member of the 4TU RE centre I will aim to improve and develop methods to monitor and quantify flood risk and resilience and to incorporate resilience in designs for flood risk reduction in cities and urban regions, including both grey and green (nature-based) interventions.