Mr. Angel just arrived from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) where he finished his second M.Sc., to join the S4H team as s Ph.D. student. Christiam’s academic and research trajectory starts as a student at the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia) in 2014, where he early began to participate in research projects. During this time, he studied the structural behavior of modular Bamboo as a construction material and its economic benefits for affordable housing in developing countries. In addition, he completed his undergraduate thesis developing a viscoelastic wall system for low-rise buildings. At the graduate level, he worked on the seismic behavior and design of composite-hollow-core diaphragm systems, including its numerical modeling and full-scale experimental validation. This research allowed him to be a major contributor to several publications in journals and engineering seminars.

During the S4H project, he will be mainly involved in WP2, in the assessment of the out-of-plane collapse of masonry structures based on shaking-table tests of various types of geometries and scale prototypes and models, using traditional and novel materials (i.e. printed 3D blocks). These results will allow subsequent calibration of numerical models and the verification of the efficiency of analytic formulations.