Awardees
Jean Michel TORRENTI
PhD, professor at Ecole national des ponts et chaussées
Research director at ESITC Paris
Jean Michel Torrenti has forty years of experience in the mechanical behaviour and durability of concrete. His successive positions in engineering schools (Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées where is was dean of studies or ESITC Paris where he is actually research director), at the Gustave Eiffel University and in research centres have led him to carry out :
-research into the mechanical behaviour and durability of concrete structures (he has published around 100 papers and was director of 30 PhDs);
-research management (laboratory or research department management);
-expertise in the durability of engineering structures;
-standardization (he is involved in the writing of the next generation Eurocode 2 and of the French guidelines for low carbon concretes);
-and teaching at institutions such as the Ecole des ponts, where he is a professor.
Wolfram Schmidt
Wolfram Schmidt works at in the Department “Safety of Structures” at the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM), responsible for the rheology and admixtures laboratory with a research focus on particle-polymer-fluid interactions and innovative organic and mineral cement and concrete constituents. Furthermore, he is Secretary of the German Rheological Society, and Officer in the Development Advisory Committee and Bureau of RILEM, where he is also the Convenor for the sub-Saharan African region. He is founder of the Pan-African cement round robin (PACE-PTS) and initiator of the conference series “Advances in Cement and Concrete Technology in Africa” (ACCTA) and ISEE-Africa (Innovation, Science, Engineering, Education). With his colleague Kolawole Olonade (UNILAG) he received the German-African Innovation Incentive Award GAIIA for developing cementitious binders and chemical admixtures from wastes of cassava production.
Many of his research and educational projects such as KEYS, INFRACOST, Local-Care, and Circular B-I/O are focused on the potentials for more sustainable, circular urban construction technologies using local, environmentally friendly resources in Africa. In this context, he has recently initiated the Female Academic Leadership Network for Conscious Engineering and Science towards Sustainable Urbanisation (FALCONESS). He is also involved in a variety of activities related to sustainable construction, the most relevant of which is the GLOBE Global Consensus on Sustainability in the Built Environment.
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He is Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Association universitaire de génie civil (AUGC), a member of the Scientific Council of ANDRA (national agency for the storage of radioactive wastes), a convenor of Commission 4 (materials) and a member of the Presidium of the fib (International Federation of Concrete) and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Fondation école française du béton.
Recently, he was director of the 3M€ national FastCarb project (fastcarb.fr), which brought together 23 partners and aimed to identify the mechanisms and conditions for accelerating the carbonation of concrete, intending to increase the amount of CO2 stored in Recycled Concrete Aggregates (RCA) during a controlled industrial process, to turn them into Carbonated Recycled Concrete Aggregates (CRCA) and thus increase their use in new concretes.