Profiles of Board of Directors candidates for the 2016 election.
Bio-Sketch of Gianluca Cusatis Gianluca Cusatis is a faculty member of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Northwestern University that he joined in August 2011. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses of the civil engineering curriculum and performs research in the field of computational and applied mechanics, with emphasis on heterogeneous and quasi-brittle materials. His work on constitutive modeling of concrete through the adoption of the so-called Lattice Discrete Particle Model (LDPM), one of the most accurate and reliable approaches to simulate failure of materials experiencing strain-softening, is known worldwide. Under the sponsorship of several agencies (including NSF, ERDC, and NRC) his current research focuses on formulating and validating multiscale and multiphysics computational frameworks for the simulation of large scale problems dealing with a variety of different applications including, but not limited to, infrastructure aging and deterioration, structural resiliency, projectile penetration, and design of blast resistance structures. He is member of IA-FraMCoS, IA-Concreep, ASCE, and ACI and active in several technical committees. He chaired the ACI 446 committee on Fracture Mechanics from 2010 to 2016. He served as treasurer for IA- FraMCoS for the last three years and he is the current president for IA-ConCreep. Vision Statement IA-FraMCoS is currently experiencing a generational change: many researchers who founded the organization more than 25 years ago are either retired or close to retirement. Hence, the survival and progress of the organization will rely on young and motivated researchers that will bring within IA-FraMCoS new ideas and renovated energy. IA-FraMCoS should continue to organize the FraMCoS conference as per its main mission but it should also be active in educating the new generations of engineers on the importance of concrete fracture mechanics in modern civil engineering.