Scientific Committee Speakers
Victor Hidalgo , Ph.D. – Escuela Politécnica Nacional – Ecuador (EPN)
Victor Hidalgo is working on numerical simulation and software code development for fluid mechanics, image processing and data analysis. He likes to work with GNU-Linux operating system due to in fact that its versatility and applicability on servers and numerical clusters. He applied C++, python, rush, JavaScript and Go language on Computational Fluid Mechanics with OpenFOAM. In this context, He wrote more than forty scientist papers using free and open source software, which are using on hydraulic industries and hydraulic turbine machinery. Now, he is an Associate Professor at Escuela Politécnica Nacional of Ecuador, EPN, Vice president of Latin Group of IAHR focused on turbine machinery and the President of The EPN Professors Association (ADEPON).
Alain Kassab, Ph.D. – University of Central Florida – Orlando (UCF)
Professor Kassab is Pegasus Professor and Trustee Chair Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando, Florida. He earned a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Florida in 1989. He joined UCF in 1991, where he served as MAE Graduate Program Director for 15 years, and he is currently serving as Director of the MAE Graduate Bioengineering Program. He is also co-director of the Medical Education Dual Degree Program administered jointly by the UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science and the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences. Professor Kassab’s research interests are in bioengineering, boundary element and meshless methods, computational heat transfer and fluid flow, and inverse problems. He has over 400 journal papers, conference papers, books, edited proceedings and other scientific publications. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, American Heart Association, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Education, and industry such as Siemens Power Generation and Orlando Health. He has guided to graduation 19 PhD and 29 MS students as well as numerous undergraduate honors theses. Professor Kassab is Editor of Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements and Associate Editor of Inverse Problems in Science and Engineering and Critical Reviews in Bioengineering and is member of several international Editorial Boards. Dr. Kassab has received several teaching, research, and service awards at UCF. He was elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2019, Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2000, and Fellow of Wessex Institute of Technology in 1999.
Professor Luiz Carlos Wrobel
Luiz Carlos Wrobel is Full Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Pontifícal Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) since 2019. Before that, he was a Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering at COPPE/UFRJ from 1981 to 1989, Professor of the Wessex Institute of Technology in Southampton, UK, from 1989 to 1996, and Full Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Brunel University London, UK, from 1996 to 2018. He still has a part-time contract with Brunel University London because of ongoing research projects, and is a Visiting Professor at the Tokyo University of Science.
He was a member of the Board of the National Structural Integrity Research Centre, Cambridge, UK, a member of the Board of the Brunel Innovation Centre at TWI, Cambridge, e a member of the Oil & Gas Board of the UK Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. He was an external assessor to the University of Leeds, University of Manchester, University of Bradford, University
of Central Florida (USA), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), University Sains Malaysia (Malaysia), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), State University of Campinas (Brazil), and the Graz University of Technology (Austria). He is also a member of the Editorial Board of eight international journals.
He has supervised 44 PhD theses, 5 MPhil theses and 39 MSc theses, in Brazil, UK and other countries, all successfully defended, besides 18 post-doctoral researchers. He was also the supervisor of 67 MEng and BEng final year projects. He is the author or co-author of four books on numerical methods in engineering, one of which was translated to Russian, Japanese and Chinese. He has also contributed 27 chapters to edited books, and has published 197 papers in international journals and 281 papers in international conferences.
He has been awarded the following prizes: The Vehicle Technology Prize of the Institute of Vehicle Engineers, UK, for supervising the Best Final Year Project of 2002; The Best Student Paper Award at the World Congress on Engineering 2017, London, UK, for the paper Kogo, B.E., Wang, B., Wrobel, L.C. and Chizari, M., Residual Stress Simulations of Girth Welding in Subsea Pipelines;
The IX CREA-RJ Prize for Scientific and Technological Projects in Brazil for the supervision of the Best MSc Thesis of 2020/2021.
Erick Savedra - Santiago University - Chile
Prof. Saavedra Flores joined the Department of Civil Engineering at Santiago University in 2005. He obtained his PhD in Civil Engineering in 2011, in the Zienkiewicz Centre for Computational Engineering at Swansea University, Wales, United Kingdom. He held the position of post-doctoral research officer at Swansea between 2011 and 2013. His postdoctoral investigation was funded by the European Research Council and by a postdoctoral fellowship granted by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID). During his leave in the United Kingdom, he also worked part-time as a senior structural engineer for the company Black & Veatch. In Chile, he was involved in relevant structural engineering projects, such as the Santiago Metro Line 4A, currently part of the Santiago Metro network. From 2016 to date, he is a member of the editorial board of Applied Mathematical Modelling. He has published two books and several scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. He has guided Postdocs, PhD and MSc students. His research interests are multi-scale finite element methods in non-linear solids mechanics, computational structural mechanics and constitutive modelling of materials. He has given special attention to the modelling of wood materials and timber structures. In 2016, he was awarded a FONDEQUIP project granted by ANID to implement the largest seismic shaking table in South America. Since 2019, Prof. Saavedra Flores has been the head of the Department of Civil Engineering at Santiago University.
