Dr Emilio Garcia-Taengua

Profile

Dr Garcia-Taengua is the Director of Student Education of the School of Civil Engineering. As such, he is responsible for the coordination, development and delivery of the School’s learning and teaching strategy, and oversees the development and quality enhancement of all taught programmes in the School. Before taking up this role, he was Deputy Director of Student Education for Taught Postgraduate programmes, and designed and developed the MSc in Transport Infrastructure: Design and Construction, which he led for several years.

He is a civil and structural engineer who specialises in concrete technology and concrete structures. After studying the 5-year full-time programme that leads to the professional qualification of Chartered Engineer in Spain (Ingeniero de Caminos, Canales y Puertos), he did an MSc in Data Analysis and Applied Statistics and got his PhD from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) with the thesis "Bond of Reinforcing Bars to Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete". His background in structural engineering and experimental research covers a variety of topics related to cement-based materials and concrete structures. Before joining the University of Leeds, he worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Concrete Science and Technology ICITECH (Valencia, Spain), lectured in Construction Materials at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), and was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Queen's University of Belfast (UK) after receiving a Marie Curie Fellowship for Experienced Researchers to be involved in a European project involving universities and industrial partners in the UK, Italy and the Republic of Ireland.

He is an active member of the American Concrete Institute (ACI), in which he serves as a member of different technical committees, and as a voting member of the ACI 544 committee on fiber-reinforced concrete. He is the principal investigator of the research project “Optimisation of Fibre-Reinforced Concrete using Data Mining”, funded by the Concrete Research Council / ACI Foundation, and serves as associate editor and reviewer for a number of scientific journals. He is also a member of the RILEM (International Union of Laboratories and Experts in Construction Materials, Systems and Structures), where he has been actively involved in the technical committee TC-261CCF on creep of cracked fibre-reinforced concrete. Due to his background and research experience in both data science and concrete technology, he is internationally recognised as an expert in machine learning and artificial intelligence methods applied to the optimisation of special concretes.

Responsibilities

• Director of Student Education

Research interests

His research interests cover a wide variety of topics in the field of concrete science and technology, including self-compacting and fibre-reinforced concretes, rheology of cement-based materials, sustainability and recycled aggregates, bond of reinforcement to concrete, prestressed concrete elements, FRP reinforcement, creep of structural elements in flexure, concrete durability, robustness and resilience of concrete structures. He is also interested in big data and data analytics applied to the design and analysis of experimental campaigns and the improvement of concrete manufacturing processes.

Qualifications

• PhD Concrete Science and Technology
• MSc Applied Statistics (Data Analysis)
• MEng MSc Civil and Structural Engineering

Professional memberships

• CEng CICCP (Spain and ECCE)
• Institute of Engineering and Technology IET
• American Concrete Institute ACI
• RILEM

Student education

Dr Garcia-Taengua is part of the senior leadership of the School of Civil Engineering and ensures that our teaching portfolio meets the highest standards of excellence, offering a fantastic learning experience to our students. He currently teaches bridge engineering and is involved in teaching modules related to concrete structures, prestressed concrete design and technology, structural analysis and design, and construction technology.

Research groups and institutes

• Materials and Structures
• Cities, Infrastructure and Energy