Teachers and Lecturers Historic Masonry Summer School Segovia 2023

HISTORIC MASONRY STRUCTURES

TEACHERS

Maurizio Angelillo

Professor at Università degli Studi di Salerno

Professor

Maurizio Angelillo is Professor of Statics and Strength of Materials at the School of Engineering and Architecture of the “Università degli Studi di Salerno”. Architect and structural expert with multi-disciplinary research interests including masonry mechanics, and Biomechanics, trained in Architecture at the University of Neaples and in Mechanics at the University of Minnesota, he and his group are actively working on the kinematics and on the equilibrium of masonry buildings. Angelillo, who is the Editor and the co-author of the CISM books “Mechanics of Masonry Structures” and “Discrete Computational Mechanics of Masonry Structures”, works on unilateral models for masonry since the early 80s, being the author of more than 50 papers on the application of these models to real masonry structures and masonry elements such as arches, domes, vaults and spiral stairs.

Philippe Block

Professor at ETH Zurich

Philippe Block is Professor at the Institute of Technology in Architecture at ETH Zurich, where he co-directs the Block Research Group (BRG) together with Dr. Tom Van Mele. He is director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) in Digital Fabrication, and founding partner of Ochsendorf DeJong & Block (ODB Engineering). Block studied architecture and structural engineering at the VUB, Belgium, and at MIT, USA, where he earned his PhD in 2009. Research at the BRG focuses on computational form finding, optimisation and construction of curved surface structures, specialising in unreinforced masonry vaults and concrete shells. Within the NCCR, BRG researchers develop innovative structurally informed bespoke prefabrication strategies and novel construction paradigms employing digital fabrication. With the BRG and ODB Engineering, Block applies his research into practice on the structural assessment of historic monuments in unreinforced masonry and the design and engineering of novel shell structures.

Professor

Alessio Bortot

Professor

Professor at Università di Trieste

Alessio Bortot, an Architect and a “Doctor Europaeus” since 2016 in Architecture, City and Design, with a specialization in Representation, is Associate Professor at the Department of Engineering and Architecture in the University of Trieste since 2021.

He has been professor for the course of “Descriptive geometry”, “Advanced technologies for representation” and “Digital 3D modelling” at the IUAV University of Venezia, at the faculty of Engineering of the University of Padova, at the IED of Venice and at the École National Supérieure des Travaux Publics in Yaoundé (Camerun). He has participated to national (PRIN 2010-2011) and international research projects (James Turrell. Roden Crater Project – Florence 2007; Jean François Niceron. Prospettiva, catottrica e magia artificiale – Rome 2013.

Gianmarco de Felice

Professor at Università degli Studi Roma Tre

Gianmarco de Felice is professor of structural engineering at the Department of Engineering of Roma Tre University. He is coordinator of the PhD school in Civil Engineering at Roma Tre University, chairmen of the RILEM Technical Committee TC-250 CSM “Composites for Sustainable strengthening of Masonry” and member of the drafting Committee of the Charter of Rome on the Resilience of Art Cities to Natural Catastrophes. He has been the scientific coordinator for the design of engineering projects on heritage conservation and structural rehabilitation, such as the restoration of the Farnese Palace in Ischia di Castro and that of the Abbey of San Clemente in Casauria supported by the World Monuments Fund and awarded by the Domus International Prize for Restoration and Conservation.

Professor

Paula Fuentes González

Professor at Universidad de Alcalà

Professor

Paula Fuentes is Architect by the Polytechnic University of Madrid and has a Master in Building Structures. Her research focuses in history of construction, masonry structures and metric survey of architectural heritage In this field she has worked as a post doc researcher in the BTU Cottbus Senftenberg being member of the DFG Research Training Group 1913 “Cultural and Technological Significance of Historic Buildings”, and in the Department of Architectural Engineering at the VUB, in a project funded by a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship. Since 2021 she is Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Alcalá She is the founder, together with Rosa Ana Guerra, of the metric survey and analysis report of architectural heritage association villard 3 D.

Santiago Huerta

Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Santiago Huerta is a professor of Structural Design at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM). President of the Spanish Construction History Society (SEDHC). Work as consultant for Historical Constructions Analysis (Cathedrals of Mallorca; Santiago de Compostela; Lonja de Mallorca; San Juan de los Reyes, etc.). Director of publications of the Juan de Herrera Institute. Author of more than 80 publications: books (editor), articles and papers, mainly on historic masonry structures and Construction History. Prize for the ‘Dissemination of Architecture’ related to the Exhibition and Catalog Guastavino Co. the Reinvention of the Vault (COAM), 2003. Telford Gold Medal of the British Civil Engineers Association London, 2011.

Professor

Antonino Iannuzzo

Tenured Assistant Professor at University of Sannio

Professor

Antonino Iannuzzo is a professor in Solid and Structural Mechanics at the University of Sannio and Rita Levi Montalcini fellow. His research involves the kinematics and statics of 3D unilateral structures through new optimisation strategies. He obtained his PhD from the University of Naples Federico II with a dissertation introducing an innovative approach to modelling fractures in masonry, which led to the development of the PRD and CDF methods. From 2018 to March 2022, Antonino worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich within the Block Research Group. In 2022, he served as a Senior Lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. In recognition of his international career achievements, he was awarded the prestigious Rita Levi Montalcini Fellowship by the Italian Ministry of University and Research in late 2022.

John Ochsendorf

Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

John Ochsendorf is a structural engineer with multi-disciplinary research interests including the history of construction, masonry mechanics, and sustainable design. Trained in structural mechanics at Cornell, Princeton, and the University of Cambridge, he conducts research on the structural safety of historic monuments, and the design of more sustainable infrastructure. His group is actively researching the dynamics of masonry buildings, the safety of cracked masonry vaults and domes, displacement loading of structures and the design of more sustainable infrastructure. Ochsendorf is the author of “Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile” and several dozen journal papers in structural mechanics. He has been awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Professor

Esther Redondo

Professor

Professor at European University of Madrid

Architect, graduated from the School of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Madrid. Working as a structural designer and consultant since 1999, as co-founder of the GV408 Studio, since 2001 she teaches structural design at the School of Architecture of the European University of Madrid, where she has been in charge of several subjects in the area of structures, as well as joint subjects in the area of technology. She also worked as a visiting professor at ETSAM (Madrid), EaT (Toledo), Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid) and Universidad de Ambato (Ecuador). PhD in 2013 -"Tile vaulting in Sapin in the 19th Century: The transformation of a constructive system"-, her current field of research is the history of construction and structures. In this context, she has written numerous publications and participated in the organization of related congresses in Madrid (2013), Segovia (2015) and Soria (2019).

LECTURERS and TUTORS

Ricardo Maya Avelino

Post-Doctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich

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Lecturer

Ricardo Maia Avelino is a researcher and structural engineer with interests in historic structures, sustainable design, and XR/AI applications in engineering. In 2023, he completed his PhD at ETH Zurich with the Block Research Group (BRG). His dissertation on Thrust Network Optimization for Masonry Assessment was awarded the ETH Medal for outstanding doctoral thesisLater, he joined Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in New York as a structural engineer, contributing to complex international projects and developing AI tools to streamline structural design.In 2025, Ricardo returned to ETH Zurich as the Design++ Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate at the BRG, while continuing to serve as a structural engineering consultant at SOM.

Alessandro Dell'Endice

Post-Doctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich

Alessandro is a chartered building engineer and architect. In 2013, he completed a Master's Degree in Building Engineering and Architecture at the Politecnico di Bari (Italy), with an experimental thesis on aluminium-concrete composite materials for free-form structures. From 2013 to 2015, he worked in Italy as a structural engineer and architect on various residential building projects. In 2016 he earned a Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) in Architecture and Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich, led by the Gramazio Kohler Research Group. In November 2016, he joined the Block Research Group (BRG) as an intern and then as a Research Assistant. In 2018, he started a PhD at BRG, focusing on developing computational tools for the structural assessment and design of unreinforced masonry structures using the Discrete Element Method, investigating the role of geometrical imperfections on their structural behaviour. In 2021, Alessandro took part as a structural designer and BRG project leader in the realisation of Striatus, an unreinforced masonry 3D-concrete-printed pedestrian bridge built in Venice. From August 2021, he was Visiting Researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley for six months, hosted by Prof. Matthew J. DeJong, working on the mechanical behaviour of unreinforced masonry spiral staircases. Alessandro currently works at the BRG as a Post-Doctoral Researcher.

Lecturer

Research Fellow

Amal Gerges

Research Fellow at Università Degli Studi di Cagliari

Amal Gerges holds a Ph.D. in Architecture and Civil Engineering from the University of Cagliari and has been awarded the Doctor Europaeus certificate. Her doctoral dissertation, Modelling Masonry as a Continuum: Finite Element Analysis Using Abaqus, focused on the stability of masonry structures under static and dynamic loads, with particular emphasis on bridging the gap between limit analysis-based approaches and finite element modeling through the treatment of masonry as a continuum. She is currently an assegnista di ricerca (postdoctoral researcher) at the Department of Architecture, Roma Tre University, where her research focuses on the structural assessment and conservation of historic masonry structures, combining finite element modeling, limit analysis, and computational mechanics. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari, contributing to a nationally funded project on the structural behaviour of Nuragic architecture. During a research stay at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM), she worked under the supervision of Prof. Santiago Huerta on limit analysis methods for masonry structures. Before pursuing academia, she worked on construction and rehabilitation projects in Lebanon and Syria and has been actively involved in tutoring and delivering seminars in Structural Dynamics, Seismic Engineering, and finite element modeling.

Pietro Meriggi

Lecturer at Università Roma Tre

Pietro Meriggi is an Assistant Professor and member of the Structures Research Group at the Department of Engineering of Roma Tre University. Born in 1992, he got his BSc in 2014, his MSc in 2017, and his PhD in Civil Engineering in 2021 at Roma Tre University. His scientific interests and expertise include laboratory and field testing of both traditional and innovative materials and of full-scale masonry structural members (subject to static and dynamic loads), analytical modelling of masonry structures and development of rules for the design of masonry constructions. From January to March 2020 he was visiting PhD Student at Navier Laboratory – IFSTTAR in Paris, where he started studying possible strengthening solutions for 3D printed digital concrete structures. Pietro has recently been involved in International Technical Committees, including the RILEM TC 250-CSM “Composites for sustainable strengthening of masonry” and the ACI 549 0L – RILEM TC 250 CSM Liaison Subcommittee “Design and Construction of Externally Bonded Fabric Reinforced Cementitious Matrix (FRCM) Systems for Repair and Strengthening Masonry Structures”. Since 2017 he is teaching assistant for the course of Earthquake Engineering at Roma Tre University.

Assistant Professor

Andrea Montanino

Lecturer

Associate Professor at the Pegaso University

Andrea Montanino is Associate Professor of Mechanics of Solid and Structures at the Pegaso University since February 2026. He obtained his PhD in Computational Mechanics and Advanced Materials from the University of Pavia in 2015. His thesis was awarded as the Best PhD thesis in Computational Mechanics of Fluids by the Italian Group of Computational Mechanics. Since then, his research has focused on different applications of computational mechanics, including fluid-dynamics for risk assessment, biomechanics and computational methods for masonry structures. From 2016 to 2019 he has been Post-doc Fellow at the Polytechnic University of Milan, working on the biomechanics of the human cornea, and from 2019 to 2024 has been Assistant Professor at the University of Naples Federico II. Between 2024 and 2025 has been Innovation Leader at the International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering. He is coauthor of about 40 publications on peer-reviewed international journals.

Fabian Bernal Orozco Barrera

Lecturer at National Autonomous University of Mexico

Fabian Bernal Orozco Barrera: Fabian specializes in masonry vaults and domes, using static and pseudo-static thrust line techniques to assess the safety of historical masonry buildings. He studied architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and earned a master’s degree in Restoration. He did a research stay at the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 2019 at the Department of Structures and Physics of Buildings. He is a structures professor at the Faculty of Architecture at UNAM, collaborating as an independent researcher. He has worked as an active consultant on the assessment of Masonry Structures in Mexico for private and public entities since 2020. He has worked on the restoration and retrofitting of masonry buildings for the post-2017 earthquakes in Mexico.
He has been at the HIMASS Summer School every year since 2021, conducting some of the surveys for the case studies and participating as a teaching assistant. Currently, he is a PhD. Student of the Italian National Doctorate, Defense Against Natural Risks and Ecological Transition of Built Environment, University of Catania /Cagliari.

Lecturer

Natalia Pingaro

Lecturer

Research Contractor at Politecnico di Milano

Natalia Pingaro, Eng., PhD, is a Research Contractor in Solids and Structural Mechancis at Politecnico di Milano. She received her PhD in Structural Mechanics from Politecnico di Milano in December 2025, with honours. Her scientific interests focus on the numerical and computational modelling of masonry structures, with particular emphasis on nonlinear finite element analysis, limit analysis of arches, vaults, and domes, digital stereotomy, and innovative strengthening techniques using composite materials. She is the author and co-author of several papers published in international peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings in the field of structural mechanics and masonry structures, and has received several academic awards in recognition of her scientific achievements. She previously worked as a Researcher at EUCENTRE (Pavia, Italy), where she contributed to research activities on the seismic vulnerability assessment and numerical modelling of masonry underground structures. She is actively involved in the scientific community as Guest Editor of international journal Special Issues, as organizer, co-chair and executive chair of scientific events and Special Sessions at international conferences.

Felix Rodriguez

Consultant at GV408 studio and Lecturer at European University of Madrid

Félix Rodríguez is an architect specialized on structural analysis, currently working as a consultant for GV408 studio and as a lecturer on structural design at European University of Madrid.

He completed his BSc in 2021 and his MSc in 2023 at Escuela Técnica Superior de Madrid, where he specialized on historical masonry structures and thrust line analysis, writing his bachelor thesis on the interventions and structural analysis of San Fernando church in Mexico under the supervision of Santiago Huerta, he has taken part as an assistant on the tile vaulting workshop at Polytechnic University of Madrid and as a tutor in the previous editions of the Summer School on Historic Masonry Structures.

Félix Rodríguez is an architect specialized on structural analysis, currently working as a consultant for GV408 studio and as a lecturer on structural design at European University of Madrid.

Lecturer

Marialuigia Sangirardi

Lecturer

Research Associate at University of Oxford

Marilù is a Research Associate at the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford where she's working on the development of new advanced and non-invasive in situ testing methods for historic masonry. She received her PhD in Structural Engineering in 2016 from the Technical University of Bari and the University of Minho, where she spent a visiting period as part of the ISISE Historic Masonry Group lead by Professor P.B. Lourenço. She has been working as scientific consultant in international research projects and as research fellow in Bari, Pavia and Rome, in the Research Group coordinated by Gianmarco de Felice. Her research interests include constitutive modelling of masonry, computer vision based monitoring strategies, numerical simulations of various boundary value problems, under static and dynamic conditions, with particular emphasis on historical constructions, low-impact retrofitting techniques and soil-structure interaction. She serves as reviewer for several international journals in preservation, structural engineering, and mechanics.

Anjo Weichbrodt

Freelance conservator

Anjo is a freelance conservator for built heritage based in Basel, Switzerland. He started as an apprentice in wall painting conservation in France, then pursued further studies and work in Rome, Italy. He completed the conservation master’s program at SUPSI in Switzerland in 2012 alongside the postgraduate internship program at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

Throughout his career, he extended his experience in monitoring and assessing material deterioration and properties to make informed preservation decisions that prioritize minimal intervention. In that capacity, he was part of a research group at ETH Zurich working on the Lausanne Cathedral from 2019 to 2025.

In 2021, Anjo first attended the HIMASS summer school to develop his understanding of the structural performance of historic masonry and later spent a sabbatical semester at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) to take classes with Santiago Huerta.

Freelancer

Teaching Assistants

Tvrtko Renić

Research Associate at the University of Zagreb

Tvrtko Renić is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Zagreb, Faculty of Civil engineering where he has been working at the department for strucures since 2017 on research and teaching in the feild of new and existing concrete and masonry structures. He received his PhD in structural engineering at University of Zagreb in 2022. His main fields of interest are seismic analysis and design, existing masonry structures, strengthening methods, graphical methods of analysis and design and use of non-metallic reinforcement. He is part of a research project that aims to study typical unreinforced masonry buildings in Zagreb with emphasis of their assessment and post-earthquake retrofitting.

Research Fellow

Habib Katouli

PhD Student

University of Naples Federico II (Italy)

Habib is a second-year PhD student in Structural and Seismic Engineering at the University of Naples Federico II. His research focuses on the dynamics of masonry structures, their monitoring, and strategies for seismic and static interventions. He completed a second MSc in Italy, concentrating on the structural assessment of historic masonry vaults using TNA. With over five years of professional experience in the retrofitting and rehabilitation of different historic buildings in Iran, Habib is currently engaged in the assessment, design, and intervention of existing masonry structures. He attended the 2022 edition of the HIMASS.

Elizabeta Šamec

Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb

Elizabeta Šamec is an Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Civil Engineering, where she conducts research and teaches in the Department of Engineering Mechanics. Her research focuses on the development and application of advanced computational methods for structural analysis, with particular emphasis on form-finding techniques and the Discrete Element Method (DEM). Her main research interests include the analysis of historical masonry structures, numerical modelling, seismic assessment and retrofitting. Her current work focuses on the restoration of the Zagreb Cathedral following the 2020 earthquakes. She has also participated in several research projects related to sustainable construction materials and digital fabrication. She leads the Normalisation and Best Practices Working Group within the COST Action Open Network on DEM Simulations (ON-DEM), coordinating international efforts to develop benchmark examples and best-practice guidelines for DEM applications.

Assistant Professor

Ilaria Scarcelli

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Polytechnic University of Bari (Italy)

Ilaria Scarcelli is a PhD student in Structural Mechanics at the Department of Architecture, Construction and Design of the Polytechnic University of Bari.She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Building Engineering and her Master's degree in Civil Engineering. During her Master’s thesis, she focused on the field of masonry structures and membrane analysis, particularly on the case study of star vaults the Thrust Surface Method. She is currently pursuing her doctoral research on masonry, with a specific focus on the study of masonry dynamics. She attended the 2024 edition of the HIMASS.

PhD Student