IABSE Official Lecture

Prof. Fernando Branco; IABSE President

Professor Fernando Branco, assumed office on November 1, 2016, as president of the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE), for the period 2016-2019. Fernando Branco is a full-time professor and former president of the Civil Engineering Dept. IST - University Lisbon. He left recently the Presidency of the European Council of Civil Engineers (ECCE) and he is currently a partner of GATEWIT - Construction Information Technologies and of SACIV, Ld.- Civil Engineering Services. His fields of expertise are bridge design, maintenance and rehabilitation, and new materials, and has been a consultant for major Public Works such as the S. João Bridge, Vasco da Gama Bridge in Portugal and the Macau-Taipa Bridge, China. Being simultaneously an academic and a bridge consultant, he joined IABSE in the late 1980’s because of the quality of IABSE’s journal Structural Engineering International (SEI) and the very interesting conferences, where he felt and as he feels today, to be updated with the recent innovations in structural engineering. Soon afterwards, he was invited to participate in one of the IABSE Technical Groups, where he joined those people who were performing innovation and became part of it himself. Those contacts led to joint European Research projects, like the development of one of the first Knowledge-Based Bridge Management Systems, or the building of a bridge model with active control flaps to reduce wind vibrations..