Keynotes

Keynote lectureUSA · Lehigh University

Dan M. Frangopol

He is the inaugural holder of the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture Emeritus at Lehigh University, which he joined in 2006 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the field of life-cycle engineering of civil and marine structures under various types of hazards. His research applies probabilistic and optimization concepts to structural reliability, life-cycle cost analysis, probability-based assessment and design, structural health monitoring, the maintenance and management of infrastructure under extreme events, multi-hazard risk mitigation, sustainability and resilience to disasters, and climate change adaptation. He is the Founding President of IABMAS and of the International Association for Life-Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE), and the Founding Editor of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering. He holds six honorary doctorates and fourteen honorary professorships, and in 2023 ASCE established the Dan M. Frangopol Medal for Life-Cycle Engineering of Civil Structures. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the U.S. National Academy of Construction, a foreign member of the Canadian, Japanese and Mexican Academies of Engineering, and a Distinguished Member of ASCE.

Keynote lectureSpain · UPC – Barcelona Tech

Joan Ramon Casas

He is Professor of Bridge Engineering at the Barcelona School of Civil Engineering, UPC-BarcelonaTech, where he earned his degree in civil engineering (1984) and his PhD in construction engineering (1988). His field is the design, construction and management of bridges and structural health monitoring (SHM), with a main focus on fiber optic sensors. A founding member and Secretary General of IABMAS since 1999, he was Vice-President of EUROSTRUCT from 2017 to 2022 and chaired IABSE Working Commission I on structural performance, safety and analysis from 2009 to 2013, having been its vice-chair since 2005. He is Editor-in-Chief for Europe and Associate Editor of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, Associate Editor of the Journal of Bridge Engineering (ASCE), and Specialty Chief Editor of the Built Environment–Bridge section of Frontiers.

Keynote lectureUSA · Los Alamos National Laboratory

Charles R. Farrar

He has been a guest scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) since 2025. The first ten years of his LANL career were devoted to experimental and analytical structural dynamics across a wide variety of systems, from nuclear power plant structures under seismic loading to weapons components across their loading environments. His research focuses on integrated hardware and software solutions for structural health monitoring (SHM), documented in more than 400 publications and in numerous keynote lectures at conferences and universities. He is a Fellow of ASME, ASCE and the Society for Experimental Mechanics, held a U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visitor Fellowship, and is Shimizu Distinguished Researcher in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University. In 2000 he founded the Los Alamos Dynamics Summer School and, with faculty at the University of California San Diego, the LANL/UCSD Engineering Institute, which he led until 2024 and out of which grew a UCSD degree-granting graduate program in NDE and SHM, where he has taught a course since 2006. He also co-founded the Los Alamos Judicial Science School, a one-week program that helps judges assess the quality of science and engineering presented in their courts, and has taught SHM short courses more than 45 times across Asia, Australia, Europe, South America and the United States.

Keynote lectureChina · Tongji University

Airong Chen

Engineering Intelligence for Bridge Design, Construction and Maintenance

He is the Director of the Research Lab for Bridge Design Methods and Processes, College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University, and Chair of the IABMAS China Group. His research spans bridge wind engineering, life-cycle design theory, multi-physics numerical simulation, structural topology optimization, and bridge intelligent engineering. He has led over ten major national research projects, edited three industry codes and specifications, authored twelve monographs, and published more than 300 academic papers. He is the recipient of the IABMAS Senior Prize. His ongoing research focuses on trust-enabled human-AI collaboration and on the deployment of agent-based systems for bridge modeling, computation, analysis and evaluation throughout the full lifecycle of design, construction and maintenance.