New Swiss Government Excellence scholar at EESD

Dr Ryan Hoult wins a Swiss Government Excellence scholarship for researchers with which he visits the EESD laboratory for one year. Ryan holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne (2017), where he was recently promoted to Senior Tutor of the Department of Infrastructure Engineering. His research focuses on developing reliable numerical and engineering mechanical models for predicting the response of non-ductile reinforced concrete walls, addressing in particular the behaviour of non-rectangular walls. Ryan, together with Aaron Appelle, will continue augmenting the EESD-data set on U-shaped walls by testing U-shaped walls with a single layer of reinforcement. As previous EESD research by Angelica Rosso and Dr João Almeida has shown, such walls can be particular prone to out-of-plane instabilities.