Dr. Kimberly Kurtis has been asked to give a keynote lecture at ASCE’s Engineering Materials Institute (EMI) conference, to be held at Northwestern University, Aug. 4-7.
Kurtis’s talk, “Concrete in the Era of Sustainability: New Opportunities for Materials Characterization” will look at the potential for interdisciplinary collaborations to expand the role played by cement-based materials in sustainable development.
“Concrete remains the most widely used construction material in the world, surpassed in its rate of annual consumption only by water,” Kurtis writes.
“As a result, much of the world’s infrastructure – whether newly constructed or aging – is cement-based. The multi-scale heterogeneity of this class of materials has contributed to the challenges with characterization, in both the plastic (i.e. “fresh”) and hardened states.”