MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub
About Us

About Us

About the Concrete Sustainability Hub

Our Mission

The MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) is a dedicated interdisciplinary team of researchers from several departments across MIT working on concrete and infrastructure science, engineering, and economics since 2009. The MIT CSHub brings together leaders from academia, industry, and government to develop breakthroughs using a holistic approach that works to achieve durable and sustainable homes, buildings, and infrastructure in ever more demanding environments.

Research Team

Leadership Team

Randolph Kirchain
Director, CSHub; PRINCIPAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST, ENGINEERING SYSTEMS DIVISION
Franz-Josef Ulm
Faculty Director, CSHub; PROFESSOR, DEPT. OF CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
Hessam AzariJafari
Deputy Director, CSHub
Andrew Laurent
Communications Director, CSHub

Principal Investigators

Admir Masic
Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Leslie Norford
Professor, Dept. of Architecture
Sidney Yip
Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Kenneth Strzepek
Research Scientist, MIT Center for Global Change Science; Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado
Elsa Olivetti
Professor, Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT SoE, Olivetti Group
Caitlin Mueller
Associate Professor, Dept. of Architecture, MIT Building Technology and Digital Structures

Research Scientists

Elizabeth Moore
Research Scientist, CSHub, MSL
Elizabeth Anne Unger
Research Scientist, CSHub, MSL
Damian Stefaniuk
Research Scientist, CSHub

Postdoctoral Associates

Miaomiao Zhang
Postdoctoral Associate, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Haoran Li
Postdoctoral Associate, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Pranav Pradeep Kumar
Postdoctoral Associate, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Meshkat Botshekan
Postdoctoral Associate, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Soroush Mahjoubi
Postdoctoral Associate, CSHub, Olivetti Group
Samira Garshasbi
Postdoctoral Associate, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Ipek Bensu Manav
Postdoctoral Associate, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Assistants

Katerina Boukin
Research Assistant, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lucy Lyu
Research Assistant, Dept. of Building Technology
Ariel Attias
Research Assistant, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Varsha Vaidyanath
Research Assistant, MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Athikom Wanichkul
Research Assistant, MIT CSHub
Marcin Hajduczek
Research Assistant, MIT CSHub
Danial Amini
Research Assistant, MIT CSHub

UROPs

Gwyneth Margaux Tangog
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Arianna Scott
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Esther Song
Undergraduate Science Communications Assistant

Click here for CSHub Alumni

Affiliates

Concrete Advancement Foundation

The vision of the Concrete Advancement Foundation is to advance the concrete industry and society toward decarbonization, resilient communities and world-class sustainable infrastructure For additional information, visit http://concreteadvancement.org/.

Portland Cement Association (PCA)

The Portland Cement Association, based in Skokie, Ill., represents cement companies in the United States and Canada. It conducts market development, engineering, research, education, and public affairs programs. For additional information, visit www.cement.org.

UMI

MultiScale Material Science for Energy and Environment (MSE2)” is an international joint unit (UMI) between CNRS and MIT at the center of a strategic association covering research, training and education in partnership with industry. The UMI aims at “bottom up” simulation and experimental verification of properties of complex multiscale materials — from atomic-scale to microns, and from nanoseconds to years. Materials with important technological, economic, energy and environmental applications will be addressed, including cement, ceramics, nuclear fuels, steels and geo-materials.

The UMI hosts French researchers at MIT, each for a number of years, and is seen as a gateway to further collaboration between CNRS and MIT. The UMI, which is housed at MIT under the auspices of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), has been designated by the CNRS as the lead unit of a Laboratoire d’Excellence consisting of multiple institutions engaged in materials science.

GDR International

The idea of setting-up the Groupement de Recherche International Multi-scale Materials Under the Nanoscope (GDRI, M2UN), is structuring the Physics, Chemistry, Mechanics and Materials Science communities on a common ground for developing an integrated approach (combining both simulation and experiments) for the prediction of texture properties from angstroms to micron and their evolution in time from nanoseconds to years of complex multi-scale materials such as clays (soil), cement, nuclear solid fuels, steels and ceramics.

The M2UN GDRI is an initiative organized under the auspices of CNRS (www.cnrs.fr). This international research organization aims at promoting:

  •  Scientific exchanges through recurrent meetings (twice a year: one at MIT, Cambridge, US, one at CINaM-CNRS Marseille).
  • Collaborations between the different teams involved including visits of PhD students, post-doctoral associates and faculty.
  • Educational activities and the spread of knowledge through the organizations of thematic schools.
  •  A platform from which participants can design grant proposals toward the US-NSF, the ESF and others funding agencies
  • The emergence of a new field of research at the frontier between Science and Engineering.

The ambition of such a GDRI is formulating a conceptual tool named as the “nanoscope” that combines most advanced statistical Physics numerical simulations (such as accelerated Molecular Dynamics) and experiments (such as X-Ray tomography and microscopy…). This “nanoscope” tools aims at elucidating the 3D texture of those multi-scale (and most of the time porous) materials from the scale of atoms to microns focusing in particular of mechanical and transport properties.

The coupling between numerical simulation and experiments is a major theme of the GDRI and is one of the most challenging issues in Material Science, Mechanics and condensed matter Physics.

From a computational point of view, two ways are usually put forward: a utopian one that aims at developing “the ultimate simulation code” and a more pragmatic one that considers associating different scales by passing the “right” piece of information to the scale above and create an interface, for instance between atomistic description and finite element methods that are operational at the scale of microns and above. We have obviously chosen this second approach. We aim at spanning not only length by also time scales and address phenomena such visco-elastic deformations and creep that cover many length and time scale. To achieve this, important experimental developments are needed to observe and understand materials texture and transport properties at different scales; these range from X-ray microcopy and tomography, electron microscopy, nano-indentation, dispersive wave spectroscopy, NMR-relaxometry. 

The scientific project of the GDRI M2UN is both fundamental and applied as it merges Science and Engineering in a single research field: as physicists or Material scientists are driven by engineering challenges and engineers move into the fundamentals of physics, a shift of paradigm is taking place that enables progress at the interface of physics and engineering for a large variety of critical problems that are at the core of many society, environmental and economy concerns in connection with durability and sustainability issues in construction, transportation, energy and waste management.