Research Professors 

Dr Georgios Hadjidemetriou was a Senior Research Associate (Research Assistant

Professor) at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He led the Data

Science team in the Digital Roads of the Future (DRF) initiative. Georgios obtained a PhD

in Civil Engineering from the University of Cyprus, in collaboration with Georgia Institute

of Technology and University of Cambridge.

Dr Ran Wei was a Senior Research Associate (Research Assistant Professor) at the

Division of Civil Engineering of the Department of Engineering at the University

of Cambridge. He led the Digital Twin team in the Digital Roads of the Future (DRF)

initiative. Before joining the University of Cambridge, he was an associate professor

(from 2020 - 2023) at Dalian University of Technology, China, where he focused his

research on digital twins and model- based system assurance for robotic and

autonomous systems.

Embedded Senior Researchers

Hussameldin M. Taha. was an industrial research fellow at Costain plc based at the

University of Cambridge. Hussameldin obtained his PhD in 2018 from Heriot-Watt

university/Scotland/UK in civil engineering. His work focused on developing self-

sensing cementitious materials which can sense damage and repair by using different

extrinsic and intrinsic sensing methods. In addition, he has extensive experience in the

construction industry particularly in highways construction and pavement materials.

Post-doctoral Fellows

Prior to joining the DRF initiative, Anand was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for

Transportation Research at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in

Civil and Environmental engineering from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2020.

 His research interests include sustainable infrastructural materials and technologies,

advanced material characterization, smart and resilient infrastructure, high performance

materials for pavements and multiscale modeling. 

Dr Vahid Afroughsabet was a MSCA Future Roads Fellow at the Geotechnical and

Environmental Laboratory at the Division of Civil Engineering of the Department of

Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD in Civil Engineering

at Politecnico di Milano in 2018. His research interests are including but not limited to

smart infrastructure materials, low carbon concrete, fibre-reinforced concrete, concrete

durability, innovative binders, sustainability, and reuse of waste in construction materials.

Daniel obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham. He has been working with

bituminous materials for about ten years, going from the physicochemical aspects of

bitumen ageing to modifications and later to its inherent self-healing ability. Focusing on

sustainable roads, Daniel is interested in improving the material flows related to road

construction to achieve sustainable practice.

Dr Yiming Zhang was a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Future Roads Fellow at the University

of Cambridge. He received his PhD degrees in Civil Engineering at Monash University 

and Southeast University in 2021. Throughout his professional career, Dr Zhang has

attained extensive industrial experience and written more than twenty well-recognized

publications regarding developing probabilistic machine-learning methods to address

engineering problems from a data-driven perspective. 

Dr Quentin Félix Adam studied theoretical mathematics and physics with a minor in

theoretical computer science at the classe préparatoire Lycée Kléber, Strasbourg,

France. He joined the Technical University of Denmark for a three-year PhD where

he promoted an emerging technology that is electrically-heated asphalt pavements. 

His expertise lies in heat transfer applied to insulated pavements. 

Dr Munkhbaatar Buuveibaatar was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Future Roads Fellow

at the Division of Civil Engineering of the Department of Engineering at the University of

Cambridge. Before joining the current position, he gained substantial experience in

operating and managing highway asset data and information management systems/

databases as a postdoctoral researcher at the Korean Institute of Civil Engineering and

Building Technology. Munkhbaatar has particular research interests and focuses on

conceptualising and implementing smart road management in the highways industry. 

Dr Fengqiao Zhang was a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Future Roads Fellow at the

University of Cambridge. She received her PhD degree in Civil Engineering at Delft

University of Technology in 2022. She has participated the project funded by Conference

of European Directors of Roads (CEDR) as a co-lead, working on evaluation various

monitoring technologies for road health monitoring. Dr Zhang has written well-recognized

publications regarding acoustic emission monitoring, concrete crack kinematics, concrete

shear failure assessment, probabilistic analysis of monitoring data.

Dr Chen was sponsored by the OMICRON project, funded by Horizon 2020, the

EU research and innovation programme. Her research project aims to develop Road

Digital Twin Tools and an Intelligent Asset Management Platform to address the needs

of road design, construction and maintenance processes. Weiwei holds a doctoral degree in

Civil Engineering from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Ms Liu was a research assistant at the Construction Information Technology Laboratory

of the Laing O’Rourke Centre. Her research interests lie in exploiting robotic automation and

intelligent sensing technologies for infrastructure engineering. At the University of

Cambridge, her research is funded by the BIM2TWIN project and focuses on capturing and

processing, visual data of infrastructure scenes intelligently.

Dr Hong received her bachelor’s degree in construction management from the Ocean

University of China in 2014. She then continued her PhD research in the University of New

South Wales, Australia. Her research interest lies in smart construction management.

One of her projects at CIT was in finding time- and risk-efficient construction method

patterns from historic projects to support schedulers producing quality planning more

confident and productive.

Prof Haiyan Xie joined the Construction Information Technology Laboratory in August

2019. Sally investigated how scheduling information should be effectively communicated

at the project and organisational level. She is a full Professor in the Department of

Technology, Illinois State University. Her recent research focuses on Smart City, Big

Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence in Construction and Operation, Simulation and

Control, and Innovative Technology in Construction Engineering and Management. 

Dr Belsky was a research associate in Laing O'Rourke Centre working with Dr Ioannis

Brilakis and Prof Campbell Middleton on the Innovate UK project: Digitally Enabling the

Design for Manufacture, Assembly and Maintenance of Bridges. He obtained his MSc

and PhD at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and his research interests include

Building Information Modeling (BIM), information exchanges and knowledge acquisition.

Dr Min-Koo was a research associate at the CIT Group of the Laing O'Rourke Centre.

He was working on a project 'Digitally Enabling the Design for Manufacture, Assembly and

Maintenance of Bridges' with Dr Michael Belsky, Dr Ioannis Brilakis, and Prof. Campbell

Middleton. He holds a PhD Degree in Civil & Environmental Engineering from both KAIST

and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He was a post-doctoral

researcher of Applied Engineering Institution at KAIST.

Dr Juan Manuel Davila Delgado was a research associate at the Centre for Smart

Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) and collaborated with the Construction Information

Technology Laboratory of the Laing  O'Rourke Centre. He obtained his PhD at Eindhoven

University of Technology and his research comprised the development of open BIM

standards for structural monitoring and damage assessment of existing infrastructure

assets.

Dr Patraucean was a research associate at the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and

Construction (CSIC). Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Ecole

Polytechnique-Inria, Paris, collaborating with Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau and

ENS Cachan. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science at the Institut National

Polytechnique de Toulouse, France. Her research focused on shape detection and

recognition in images and 3D point clouds, using probabilistic robust methods and

geometric invariance.

Dr Dai worked at the CIT group from Fall 2010 until Summer 2012. His main research

interests were reciprocal reconstruction and recognition for as-built modelling of

infrastructure. He was working on the NSF sponsored reciprocal 3D reconstruction

project for modelling of construction facilities.

Prof Koch worked at the CIT group from Spring 2010 until Summer 2010. He oversaw

the synthesis and validation activities of the NSF sponsored vision tracking project.

In parallel, he initiated a new project on pavement condition assessment systems through

machine vision.

PhD students

Dr Trzeciak was a PhD student in Engineering sponsored by BP, GeoSLAM, Laing

O'Rourke, Topcon Positioning Group, and Trimble. He worked in the industry, as a structural

engineer at BuroHappold Engineering in Berlin, and academia, as a research associate

at the Technical University of Munich. His PhD project focused on improving long-distance

3D mobile mapping of large-scale infrastructure assets in near real-time.

Mr Pan was a PhD doctoral candidate of Technical University of Munich, hired under Prof

Ioannis Brilakis's TUM fellowship. His expertise is in artificial intelligence, particularly

deep learning and image processing. His current research focuses on developing robust

methods for creating digital twins of the built environment using artificial intelligence

methods such as deep learning to interpret point cloud data.

Dr Agapaki was a PhD Candidate in Engineering sponsored by EPSRC and AVEVA

and she graduated in 2020. She was a visiting scholar for a large scale centrifuge

experiment at UC Davis on the same project. Her research project for her PhD focused

on the generation of as-is geometric Building Information Models (BIM) of industrial

facilities using novel approaches. She was supervised by Dr Ioannis Brilakis and

advised by Dr Duncan McFarlane.

Dr Lu was a PhD. Candidate at the Construction Information Technology group of

Laing O'Rourke and she graduated in 2019. She holds a Diplôme d'Ingénieur in Civil

Engineering from National Institutes of Applied Sciences of Toulouse, France. Her research

interests focus on as-is Bridge Information Modeling (BrIM) using point cloud data. S

Dr Hüthwohl was a PhD candidate at the Construction Information Technology group of

the Laing O'Rourke Centre and he graduated in 2019. He is a founder of a Computer

Vision and Automation consultancy working for leading industry customers Europe-wide.

His research topic is on image-based automated bridge assessment based on enriched

BIM models. The topic aims to assist inspection tasks on greater infrastructure elements

like bridges. 

Dr Konstantinou was a PhD candidate in the Construction Information Technology group

of the Laing O'Rourke Centre. She is a civil engineer with a 5-year of professional

experience in surveillance and structural engineering of steel and concrete structures. Her

research project was in collaboration with Laing O'Rourke and focused in investigating

the possible applications of computer vision methods in automating the measurement

of labour productivity at construction sites. 

Major Vick gained a PhD at the Construction Information Technology group of the Laing

O’Rourke Centre at the University of Cambridge in 2018. He has 13 years of experience

as a Civil Engineering Officer in the United States Air Force, where he most recently

served as an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the United States Air Force

Academy. His research focused on the use of computer vision techniques to enhance civil

infrastructure progress monitoring at remote and dangerous locations. 

Dr Kopsida was a PhD Candidate at the Construction Information Technology group of

the Laing O'Rourke Centre, as a Marie Curie fellow. Her research was focused on

Automated Progress Monitoring using BIM & a Mobile Device in an AR Environment.

The topic aimed to assist inspection and progress monitoring for interior activities in a

construction project. 

Dr Nguyen was a PhD candidate in the Construction Information Technology group

of the Laing O'Rourke Centre and she graduated in 2017. She is a civil engineer by

training with extensive knowledge and expertise within the computer vision and machine

learning domains. Her research project was in collaboration with Transport for London

investigating methods to detect and prevent bridge strike occurrences.

Dr Anagnostopoulos was a PhD Candidate at the Construction Information Technology

group of the Laing O'Rourke Centre as a Marie Curie fellow and he graduated in 2018.

Ioannis has graduated from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 2013 with a major in

Transportation Engineering and Construction Management. His research interests were

focused on Object Classification using Random Forests & Contextual Reasoning for

Modelling of Industrial Facilities. 

Dr Radopoulou was a PhD Student at the Construction Information Technology group

of the Laing O’Rourke Centre and she graduated in 2016. She started her research at

the Georgia Institute of Technology and continued it at Cambridge University. Her research

topic was Pavement Condition Monitoring using a Parking Camera & Dynamic Sensor

Data. The goal was to create a novel framework that is capable of automatically detecting

and classifying different pavement defects.

Dr Zhang was a research assistant at the CIT group and he graduated in 2016. He was

a PhD candidate at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute

of Technology. His research was based on Primitives Extraction & Bridge Component

Detection in Point Cloud Data for As-Built Modelling and it was part of the NSF sponsored

project "Reciprocal Reconstruction and Recognition for Modelling of Constructed Facilities".

Dr Rashidi completed his PhD at the CIT lab in 2014. His research focused on Improved

Monocular Videogrammetry for Generating 3D Dense Point Clouds of Built Infrastructure.

He developed novel algorithms for extracting key video frames, computing the absolute

scale of monocular settings and filling gaps and holes on surfaces of Point Cloud Data.

Dr Fathi graduated his PhD at the CIT lab, University of Cambridge in 2013. His research

objective was to solve the 3D reconstruction problems that occur when trying to get the

3D geometry of the built environment from a moving video systemHis research objective

was to solve the 3D reconstruction problems that occur when trying to get the 3D

geometry of the built environment from a moving video system, such as low accuracy,

high percentage of failures, and low utilization of the environment's intrinsic features. 

Dr Jong-Su Jeon completed his PhD at the CIT lab in 2013. He developed the framework

for the aftershock fragility assessment of RC building structures, part of the NSF-sponsored

Machine Vision Enhanced Post Earthquake Inspection project.

Dr German completed her PhD at the CIT Lab in 2013. She was working on the NSF

sponsored Machine Vision Enhanced Post Earthquake Inspection project. Her work focused

on creating image-based automated detection algorithms of damage and damage properties

on reinforced concrete columns. In addition, her work included creating a classification

model of damage indices for RC columns based on this visual damage information.

Dr Park completed his PhD at the CIT lab in 2012. His research was on construction object

classification from video data. His thesis focused on robust 3D tracking through multiple

video region matching, and feature identification and recognition based on visual pattern

recognition models.

Dr Zhu completed his PhD at the CIT lab in 2011. His research was on real-time concrete

damage visual assessment for first responders. His thesis has proposed a novel method

that can provide first responders with a crude but quick estimate of the safety of damaged

structures. Now he is an Assistant Professor at Concordia University, Canada.

Staff 

Dr Ariyachandra obtained a PhD degree in the Construction Information Technology group

at  the University of Cambridge. Her research project for the PhD was focused on the 

Automated Generation of Geometric Digital Twins of Existing Rail Infrastructure. From July

2022 to June 2024, she was the Programme Manager of Digital Roads of the Future Initiative.

She is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Bartlett School of Sustainable

Construction (BSSC) at University College London. 

Ms Sanjana Bushra worked as the DRF Programme Coordinator from July 2022 - July 2023. 

Dr Anna Hajduk worked as the Programme Manager from September 2021 - May 2022 for

Future Roads Programme.

Katharina Kroczek

Ms Kroczek was Programme Manager for the Future Roads Cofund Fellowship. She is a

qualified project manager having worked in a range of automotive and mobility sector

roles across Europe, and most recently as a management consultant. Her experience

ranges from classic IT project management to legal compliance within large scale

programmes, as well as the development of new business models. She completed her

BA (Hons) in Marketing and Management at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh.