Juan Sagaseta

Reader in Structural Robustness, University of Surrey
Dr Juan Sagaseta joined University of Surrey as a Lecturer in September 2010. He obtained the degree of Civil Engineering (Ingeniero de Caminos, Canales y Puertos) at the School of Civil Engineering in Santander, University of Cantabria (Spain) in 2003. During his degree, he specialized in the area of structures obtaining a final grade of A (Sobresaliente). After graduation, he worked as a Structural Engineer in a consultancy office in Madrid (Proes) carrying out structural design of buildings and bridges. In 2005, he moved to London to start his PhD at Imperial College London on Shear Design of Reinforced Concrete Structures. His thesis was focused on the influence of aggregate fracture on the shear strength of reinforced concrete beams. This work included testing of large-scale specimens and developing analytical models using the strut-and-tie method, discrete crack approaches and non-linear finite element analysis. The work was summarized in five journal papers and several conference papers. During his PhD he was a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London in the following courses: Constructionarium project, Creative Design, Reinforced Concrete Design, Structural Mechanics and Autocad Drawing.

From 2008 to 2010, Dr Juan Sagaseta was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, where he carried out research on punching shear of flat slabs and slab bridges. His work at EPFL focused on extending existing punching shear models and design methods to non-symmetrical cases, which are commonly found in practice. The findings contributed towards the validation of the new design formulas for punching shear in the first version of the New Model Code 2010 produced by the Fédération Internationale du Béton (fib). In 2011 he was awarded the fib Achievement Award (research category) based on his Doctoral Thesis for the scientific and technical contributions in the area of structural concrete. In 2012 he received the Magazine of Concrete Research Award (ICE publishing) for best paper of the year. In 2013-2014 he was the principal investigator in a EPSRC project on the structural performance of flat slab-column connections under impact and blast loading. He is currently involved in research on structural robustness and the development of innovative forms of construction using steel-concrete solutions.