Biography

My teaching experience spans 24 years in Civil Engineering and Structural engineering (both analysis and design) at all undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including both buildings and bridges in concrete and in steel.

I have been teaching at the University of Portsmouth since 1997 and before at the University of London-Queen Mary College where I obtained my PhD degree in Structural Fire Engineering in 1996. From October 2003 to October 2004, I was seconded to the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Testing and Research (EMPA-Zurich) to lead a Fire Structural Engineering research project involving full-scale fire testing and numerical thermomechanical simulation of behaviour of structures during fires.

Since 1997, I have worked as a consultant for University of Portsmouth Enterprise Limited (UPEL). I carried out consultancy projects related to the assessment and design of structures as well as the determination of mechanical and microstructure properties of various materials including weak-rocks and hard-soils from Dubai.  I previously worked as a consultant in materials and structures for Geomaterials Research Services in the UK. I had previously worked as a structural engineer in the UK involved in design, fabrication and construction of steel telecommunication towers and portal frames. I worked in Finland with the State Waterways and Highways Administration where I had experience in design and construction of roads and bridges. I worked in Egypt, employed by Skanska and SamCrete, on various construction sites adopting novel construction methods. In Egypt, I also worked as Irrigation Engineer to design and construct novel irrigation systems to cultivate the desert  as part of the food security efforts.

My industrial research and consultancy experience includes:

• assessment of fire damaged structures,
• assessment of dams damaged by Alkali Aggregate Reaction,
• assessment of the integrity of cast-stone (stone-faced concrete),
• assessment of damaged buildings, bridges and dams,
• deformability characteristics of weak-rocks,
• full-scale fire testing for certification and research purposes :(steel-studs gypsum-faced partition walls and doors assemblies, FRP composite flooring systems, glazed walls systems and long span timber trusses), 
• thermo-mechanical finite element modelling of buildings during fires,
• and stability of box girder bridges (non-linear finite element analysis).

My industrial experience (mainly in the UK, as well as Switzerland, Finland, and Egypt), includes:

• Structural design (both concrete and steel) according to Eurocodes EC2, EC3 and EC4;
• Site supervision of construction of buildings (Egypt and UK), roads (Finland), bridges (Finland), and telecommunication towers (UK) and irrigation systems (Egypt);
• Full-scale fire testing and fire certification (Switzerland).

Research interests

• Fire Structural Engineering: analysis, design and post-fire assessment and repair
• Numerical modelling of the thermomechanical transient behaviour of buildings during fires
• Modelling of bridge systems including material and geometric non-linearity
• Behaviour, assessment and repair of damaged and/or deteriorated infrastructure
• Novel concrete materials and in-situe assessment of material integrity and behavoiur
• Engineering Education with particular reference to graduate competencies