Professor Michael Beer

Research Overview

Michael's research is focussed on developing new theories, techniques and practical solutions to work towards sustainable, reliable and resilient civil infrastructure. Specifically, his developments combine efficient computational modeling and advanced uncertainty quantification to address the challenge of the growing scale, complexity and interconnection of engineering structures, infrastructure and systems. As a result the gap between required and available information for numerical modeling is growing quickly as well, so that uncertainties and risks are involved in our models and analyses to a greater extent than ever before. Since our engineering structures, infrastructure and systems are, to a significant extent, critical for the functionality of our economic and societal life, they require proper approaches and measures to verify and ensure their reliable performance. This range of issues is addressed with developments in the areas of (i) Reliability and Robustness of Structures and Systems, (ii) Performance, Risk and Resilience of Complex Systems and Networks, and (iii) Risk Reduction in Vague and Changing Environments.