I am in the Civil Engineering Institute in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL where I am invoved in research, teaching, collaboration with industry, looking for funding, sitting on committees and running a lab. I have also been active in consulting related to monitoring structures, applications of information technology, structural design, evaluation and repair of existing structures and accident analysis in Europe, North America and Japan - although these days, it is hard to find time for such fun.

I did my undergraduate work in Civil Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada in a four-month alternating study/industry cooperative program - finishing in 1978. This allowed me to work in structural design offices, a boundary-layer wind tunnel lab (University of Western Ontario) and for steel fabricators in Canada between 1974 and 1979. The British Government offered me a Commonwealth Scholarship in 1979 and I completed my PhD at the Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, UK in 1982. I was fortunate to be able to do this with two industrial partners (The Welding Institute and GKN).

Since then, I have been involved in research and teaching within three laboratories at EPFL. Up to 1991, I was at ICOM in the Civil Engineering Department where I continued work on measurement systems, fatigue and fracture mechanics in collaboration with industry. After a long consulting job in the USA, I formed the Knowledge Systems Group there in 1988. From 1991 to 1996, I was in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Computer Science Department where I continued to focus on AI applications for the construction industry. In 1996, I moved back to the Civil Engineering Department and was nominated "Extraordinary Professor" (!!) in 1999 and "Ordinary Professor" in 2005. I took over the direction of the Applied Computing and Mechanics Laboratory (IMAC) in November 2000. From 2001 to 2006, I was Chair of the Structural Engineering Institute within the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering. I was elected to the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2004 and received the Computing in Civil Engineering Award from the Amercian Society of Civil Engineers in 2005. My current activities and interests are summarised in the following links: